Macabre Macrame'

There is more to Edgar Allan Poe than "Quoth the Raven, nevermore." He is difficult, as he quotes Latin without interpretation and is prone to rambling "Old English" drug induced wordiness. I have a copy of his "complete tales & poems" (Dorset Press), and can only highly recommend a few as will follow. I can't imagine a reader sitting through all thousand plus pages while remaining upright. The fellow was indeed a natural genius of the dirge mentality. He is however, too depressing for the sane of us. Too much downers my man. One sentence should be one sentence, not two pages: "The Purloined Letter" for instance. It could have been jolly good but the punchline is in Latin. And E. P. regurgitates and ruminates for 1 1/2 pages. The 5 (pfft) star story has one of my favorite lines in it however: "We gave him a hearty welcome, for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man..." For my money, nothing worse than a seven star out of ten is worth a read. "The Pit and the Pendulum" is the dude's best, 9*. 8* star stories: "The Black Cat", The Masque of the Red Death"-that's it! 7* (so readable), "The Gold Bug", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "A Descent into the Maelstrom", "Ligeia", "The Tell Tale Heart". Those 4 famous stories are still tough to read after the titles. Forget "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". It could have been a 7. It's a good story (the monkey did it), but again the punchline is in a language that I did not study; French.

here's the website