The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allen Poe

Metzengerstein

A cruel young nobleman becomes supernaturally obsessed with a mysterious horse that ultimately carries him to his fiery death, fulfilling an ancient prophecy and avenging the family he wronged. ★★★

Ms Found in a Bottle

Who only has one moment to live No longer has anything to hide.

A rational, skeptical castaway finds himself aboard a phantom ship crewed by ghostly ancient sailors, hurtling unstoppably toward the South Pole and his own destruction, driven less by fear than by an overwhelming hunger to discover what lies beyond the edge of the known world.

come close to New Holland
Ended up in "Antarctica"

★★★☆

Silence - A fable

A demon recounts how he broke a solitary man on a cursed and desolate riverbank not through violent chaos, but by imposing a perfect, unnatural silence upon the world — proving that absolute emptiness is the most terrifying force of all.

story had a hippopotamus

★★★

The Assignation

A narrator in Venice witnesses a mysterious stranger rescue a noblewoman’s child from a canal, then visits the man the following morning only to discover that both the stranger and the married noblewoman have died simultaneously — victims of their forbidden, secret love. ★★★☆

Shadow – A Parable

A group of men feast in a plague-ridden chamber while haunted by the shadow of death, which ultimately speaks to them in the voices of a thousand departed souls. ★★★★

Berenice

A deeply obsessive man becomes morbidly fixated on his ailing cousin Berenice’s teeth, leading him to commit a horrifying act during a fugue state. ★★★☆

Morella

First Published: 1835

A man watches his sickly, philosophy-obsessed wife slowly die, only to find her spirit terrifyingly reborn in their daughter.

mentions muslims and the pilgramige to Mecca

★★★★

Ligeia

First Published: 1838 Age: 29

A grief-stricken narrator recounts his obsessive love for the dark, learned, and otherworldly Ligeia, who dies and appears to supernaturally possess the body of his second wife, Rowena. ★★★☆

The Fall of the House of Usher

His heart is a suspended lute; As soon as we touch it, it resonates. De Béranger

First Published: 1839 Age: 30

A nameless narrator visits his childhood friend Roderick Usher at his decaying ancestral mansion, only to witness a spiral of madness, premature burial, and the ultimate collapse of both the family line and the house itself.

★★★★

The Man That Was Used Up

Weep, weep, my eyes, and dissolve into water! One half of my life has sent the other to the grave. — Corneille

Source: These lines are from the famous French tragedy Le Cid (1637) by Pierre Corneille.

A narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering the secret behind the impossibly perfect physique and appearance of the celebrated Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, only to discover the General is almost entirely composed of prosthetic parts — the result of a brutal military campaign against a Native American tribe.

★★★★

William Wilson

First Published: 1839 Age: 30

A man recounts his lifelong torment by a mysterious double who shares his name, appearance, and birthday, culminating in a confrontation that destroys them both.

★★☆

The Man of the Crowd

First Published: 1840 Age: 31

A recovering invalid in London becomes obsessed with following a mysterious old man through the city’s crowds for an entire day and night, only to conclude that the man is a living embodiment of crime who cannot bear to be alone.

★★★☆

A Descent into the Maelström

First Published: 1841 Age: 32

A Norwegian fisherman recounts how he alone survived being caught in the vast, churning Moskstraumen whirlpool, saved not by strength but by calm observation and reasoned deduction. ★★★☆

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Ourang-Outang Clew

First Published: 1841
Age: 32

A brilliant amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin, uses keen analytical reasoning to solve the apparently impossible locked-room murders of two women in Paris, ultimately revealing the killer to be an escaped orangutan.

★★★★

Eleonora

"The soul is safe under the protection of its specific form."

First Published: 1842
Age: 32

A man recalls his idyllic life in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass with his beloved cousin Eleonora, her death, the vow he made to her, and his eventual “betrayal” of that vow when he falls in love with another woman in the outside world.

★★★☆

The Mystery of Marie Roget

First Published: 1842–1843 (serialized in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion)
Age: 33–34

Dupin investigates the murder of a young Parisian perfume shop girl, Marie Rogêt, whose body is found in the Seine — a thinly veiled fictional retelling of the real-life unsolved murder of Mary Rogers in New York. roh‑ZHAY (IPA: /roʊˈʒeɪ/)

• roh — like “row a boat” • zhay — the “zh” sound is like the s in “measure”

Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin

Private detective who is bored when not working a case.
Immediately loses interested once case odds solved
Police seek him out

...we gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.

when law becomes a science and a system, it ceases to be justice. The errors into which a blind devotion to principles of classification has led the common law, will be seen by observing how often the legislature has been obliged to come forward to restore the equity its scheme had lost.' - Landor.

The narrator describing Dupin picking apart newspaper articles which have been swapped from the "original" to French ⁉️

"That it is a vast pity its inditer (writer) was not born a parrot - in which case he would have been the most illustrious parrot of his race. He has merely repeated the individual items of the already published opinion; collecting them, with a laudable industry, from this paper and from that.

★★★☆

The Pit and the Pendulum

Latin Epigraph Translation: Here, the wicked mob of torturers nourished long-standing rages. They were unsatiated by the blood of the innocent. Now that the fatherland is safe and the cave of death is destroyed, Where grim death once was, life and health now flourish.

First Published: 1842
Age: 33

A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition endures escalating torments in a dark dungeon — a deadly pit, a descending razor pendulum, and closing walls — before being rescued at the last possible moment by French forces.

★★★★☆

The Masque of the Red Death

Hernani

First Published: 1842 (Graham’s Magazine, May 1842)
Age: Poe was 33 years old

A tyrannical prince seals himself and his court inside an abbey to escape a devastating plague, only for the personification of death itself to infiltrate his extravagant masked ball and claim every last reveler.

★★★★☆

The Oval Portrait

First Published: 1842
Age: 33

A wounded traveler takes refuge in an Italian villa, becomes captivated by a portrait of a beautiful woman, and discovers through a book that the painting drained the life from the artist’s wife as he completed it.

★★★★

The Gold-bug

First Published: 1843
Age: 34

A eccentric recluse and his companion discover a mysterious cryptogram on a piece of parchment that leads them on a treasure hunt for Captain Kidd’s buried gold.

Clever for its time in knowing how to decode the cypher but not enough to carry the story.

★★★☆

The Black Cat

Fiend Intemperance - denotes the narrator's uncontrollable alcoholism. It is personified and capitalized to emphasize it as an overpowering force leading to violent acts.

First Published: 1843
Age: 34

A man descending into alcoholism mutilates and kills his beloved cat, commits murder, and is ultimately undone by a second cat he attempted to wall up with his wife’s corpse.

★★★

The Tell-Tale Heart

First Published: 1843
Age: 34

A murderer meticulously kills an old man to escape the perceived evil of his “vulture eye,” conceals the body beneath the floorboards, and is driven to confess by the increasingly unbearable sound of the dead man’s beating heart — audible, it seems, only to himself.

★★★★

The Purloined Letter

Latin Epigraph: Nil sapientiæ odiosius acumine nimio. — Seneca
English Translation: "Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness."