Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Tales Learn by Vincent Value, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, William S. Burroughs & Others


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Right here on Hal­loween of 2024, we’ve a higher vari­ety of scary sto­ries — and arguably, a a lot scari­er vari­ety of scari­er sto­ries — to select from than ever earlier than. However what­ev­er their rel­e­vance to the spe­cif­ic lives we might stay and the spe­cif­ic dreads we might really feel immediately, what number of such cur­lease works stand an opportunity of being learn a cou­ple of cen­turies from now, with not simply his­tor­i­cal inter­est however gen­uine chills? With every Hal­loween that brings us close to­er to the 2 hundredth anniver­sary of Edgar Allan Poe’s lit­er­ary debut, the works of that Amer­i­can pio­neer of the grotesque and the macabre develop solely extra deeply trou­bling.

“The phrase that recurs most cru­cial­ly in Poe’s fictions is hor­ror,” writes Mar­i­lynne Robin­son within the New York Evaluate of Books. “His sto­ries are sometimes formed to carry the nar­ra­tor and the learn­er to a spot the place using the phrase is justified, the place the phrase and the expe­ri­ence it evokes are explored or by impli­ca­tion defined. So crypts and entomb­ments and phys­i­cal mor­bid­i­ty figure in Poe’s writ­ing with a promi­nence that’s not char­ac­ter­is­tic of main lit­er­a­ture in gen­er­al. Clear­ly Poe was fas­ci­nat­ed by pop­u­lar obses­sions, with crime, with pre­ma­ture bur­ial” — obses­sions that haven’t misplaced a lot pop­u­lar­i­ty since his day.

Examination­ined extra shut­ly, “the hor­ror that fas­ci­nat­ed him and gave such dread­ful uni­ty to his tales is commonly the inescapable con­fronta­tion of the self by a per­fect jus­tice, the expo­certain of a responsible act in a type that makes its rev­e­la­tion a recoil of the thoughts in opposition to itself.” That is true, Robin­son writes, of such still-wide­ly-read works as “The Fall of the Home of Ush­er,” “The Masque of the Purple Demise,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Inform-Story Coronary heart.”

You possibly can hear all of these sto­ries and extra in the Youtube playlist above, nar­rat­ed by a vari­ety of per­type­ers imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­ready by voice alone: Christo­pher Lee, Vin­cent Value, William S. Bur­roughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rath­bone, and the late James Earl Jones.

Whether or not learn aloud or on the web page, Robin­son notes, Poe “has at all times been reviled or cel­e­brat­ed for the absence of ethical con­tent in his work, although these tales are all straight­for­ward ethical para­bles. For a author so intrigued by the oper­a­tions of the thoughts as Poe was, an inter­est in con­science results in an inter­est in con­ceal­ment and self-decep­tion, issues which can be secre­tive and excessive­ly indi­vid­ual and on the identical time so uni­ver­sal that they form civ­i­liza­tions.” Whereas there are civ­i­liza­tions, there can be tell-tale hearts; and whereas there are tell-tale hearts, there can be an audi­ence respon­sive to Edgar Allan Poe’s model of hor­ror, on Hal­loween or any oth­er night time.


Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Why Ought to You Learn Edgar Allan Poe? An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

7 Suggestions from Edgar Allan Poe on How you can Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Inform-Story Coronary heart” & A lot Extra

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Learn by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Religion­ful & Extra

Watch a Unusual Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Inform-Story Coronary heart,” Vot­ed the twenty fourth Greatest Automobile­toon of All Time (1953)

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e book.



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