The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

This treasure chest of Poe's poems and short stories is the kind of book you savor over time. Each time I read Poe, I am reminded of what a great writer he was. Unfortunately, I missed the book club discussion (this being our October pick) and would have loved to hear what everyone thought or different ways of looking at his writing. This is a book to buy and keep at home!

After my American Lit class in high school, I mainly thought of Poe as an influential horror and mystery writer. (Not to mention the source of those great Corman/Vincent Price movies.) I was happily surprised to discover in this collection Poe's sense of humor.

Here's a few that caught me off guard because their entertaining absurdity:

In “Loss of Breath” the narrator loses his breath and is mistaken for dead, resulting in many misadventures.

In “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” the narrator's friend, Dammit (Yup, that's his name), keeps using the expression “I bet the devil my head....” Dammit bets he can jump a bridge. The devil shows up and you can imagine where this goes...

In “Angel of the Odd” the titular angel torments a man with improbable accidents.

In “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” the narrator visits a mental institution to visit and finds that the lunatics literally took over the asylum.

“X-ing a Paragrab” is a tale of two newspapermen having a “war” in print with lots of wordplay using x's and o's.

I loved the stories I knew, like “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” etc. But it was nice to be surprised by some of the odd stories that I didn't know before reading this collection.

Having read all the well-known stories and poems, I dug into this tome with anticipation, expecting many of his more obscure works to be fully as good. But I was vastly disappointed.

As we all know, his horror stories are real gems. There's a reason he's called a master of the genre. And I much enjoyed (re)reading them.

But the rest of this volume is filled with some of the dullest writings imaginable. Meandering, pointless, filled with useless tangents. Stories which skillfully build up suspense, only to end abruptly, often in the midst of the climax. Parodies of literary journals long since out of vogue. Impenetrable essays on the nature and rationale of poetry.

It surprises me that the same author can write a few stories that are so good, and many that are very bad, with almost no middle ground between.

My favorite stories remain The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and The Cask of Amontillado; as for the poems, it amazes me that The Raven is so good, and everything else so bad.