With Halloween fast approaching, let us remind you that few American writers can get you into the existentially chilling spirit of this climatically chilling season than Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). And given that he lived and wrote entirely in the first half of the 19th century, few American writers can do it at so little financial cost to you, the reader. Today we’ve collected Poe’s freely available, public domain works of pure psychological unsettlement into five volumes of eBooks:
- Volume 1
- Volume 2
- Volume 3
- Volume 4
- Volume 5
And five volumes of audiobooks as well (all the better to work their way into your subconscious):
- Volume 1
- Volume 2
- Volume 3
- Volume 4
- Volume 5
And if, beyond perhaps reading here and there about pits, pendulums, ravens, and casks in Italy, you’ve never plunged into the canon produced by this troubled master of letters — American Romantic, acknowledged adept of the macabre, inventor of detective fiction, and contributor to the eventual emergence of science fiction — your chance has come. If you feel the understandable need for a lighter preliminary introduction to Poe’s work, hear Christopher Walken (speaking of American icons) deliver a surprisingly non-excessively Walkenified interpretation of “The Raven” at the top of the post. Below, we have a 1953 animation of “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrated by James Mason:
After watching these videos, you’ll surely want to spend Halloween time catching up on everything else Poe wrote, after which you’ll understand that true scariness arises not from slasher movies, malevolent pumpkins, or tales of hooks embedded in car doors, but from the sort of thing the closed-eyed narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” means when he says, “It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see.”
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe permanently reside in our twin collections: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices
Related Content:
Watch the 1953 Animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Narrated by James Mason
Download a Free, New Halloween Story by Neil Gaiman (and Help Charities Along the Way)
Watch Goethe’s Haunting Poem, “Der Erlkönig,” Presented in an Artful Sand Animation
“A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf
Watch Nosferatu, the Seminal Vampire Film, Free Online (1922)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
One of the universal masters of the short story, which was one of the first practitioners in the country. It was renewal of the Gothic novel, remembered for his tales of terror. Considered the inventor of the detective story, also he contributed several works to the emerging genre of science fiction. I am grateful for this contribution, thanks