The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe

 

Image credit: Penguin Books

It’s been a bit of a long bout between reading adventures. As a reader I have been trying to exercise and strengthen my abilities by juggling. Whilst I have concluded that this is something that I can do, it is not something that I like to do. The last book that I closed the cover on was one that I had been working on solidly for months. Plucked from the shelf with the intent of serving as my bedtime reads with tea in the evening and then morning reads with coffee, sharing my attention between the two books meant that this one took me absolute ages. An epic challenge that I have finally triumphed over, this book was The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe.

Featuring absolutely everything from Poe’s gothic thrillers such as The Fall of the House of Usher and Murders in the Rue Morgue, to his Verne-esque tales of scientific adventure, classic adventures tales akin to Louis Stevenson, and of course his various poems, this book is an absolute rollercoaster of a reading experience. Being a chunky anthology, I most certainly would not recommend going through it in one sitting. My thought process behind my choice to read it was to read a tale or two before bed in nice, manageable instalments. Even so, Poe’s incredible prose, long-winded descriptions, and sometimes brain-imploding plots are definitely not the light evening read I had envisioned. 

Of course.

Image credit: Library of Congress

Most modern readers will probably only know Poe for The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Raven and if there is one thing that I have discovered from reading his collected works, it is that he was such a well-rounded and versatile writer. At any point within these pages one could mistake the story for one from Jules Verne or Robert Louis Stevenson. Whilst some tales are an absolute struggle, others are gripping, thrilling, and captivating from the get-go and –at the end of it all- one cannot help but feel a little smarter and more culturally enriched for having read them all. 

Author: Edgar Allen Poe

Published: Random House, Inc., New York, 1938. Penguin Books, 1982.