The Black Cat

by Edgar Allan Poe

Overview

Edgar Allan Poe, the father of American horror fiction, first published his macabre short story "The Black Cat" in the August 19, 1843 edition of The Saturday Evening Post. The frightening tale of a murderer tormented by guilt over his terrible deeds is a classic. The narrator's admission that much of his bad behavior and deranged thinking is the result of demon alcohol is possibly autobiographical, as Poe himself struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. This short work is part of Applewood's "American Roots," series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America's most famous writers and thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429096232
Publisher:	Applewood Books
Publication date:	03/31/2016
Series:	American Roots
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.Poe died at the age of 40. The cause of his death is undetermined and has been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies, suicide (although likely to be mistaken with his suicide attempt in the previous year), tuberculosis, heart disease, brain congestion and other agents.

Other Books of Author:
• The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
• The Raven (1845)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
• The Pit and the Pendulum (1842)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• The Cask of Amontillado (1846)
• The Masque of the Red Death (1842)
• The Purloined Letter (1844)
• A Descent into the Maelström (1841)

Editorial Reviews

Poe, a distant relative of Edgar Allan, follows up his debut psychological thriller, Return to the House of Usher (1996), with another variation on a classic Poe story, again set in Crowley Creek, Virginia.

Returning as protagonist is John Charles Poe, also a distant relative of Edgar Allan, who writes a "barely syndicated" column for Fannie Boynton's Crowley Creek Sentinel and who's inherited a brassbound oak casket bearing the papers of the great dead writer. It appears that Margaret Cully, the wife of the veterinarian, has vanished under mysterious circumstances; Julie Noir, a waifish raven-haired girl with a tiny gold stud in her nose, shows up and quickly replaces Margaret in Dr. Cully's clinic; and John Charles seems to be haunted by a small black shape that follows him around. Julie, who carries her black cat Asmodeus about on her shoulder, advertises the fact that she fancies herself a witch. After John Charles helps Dr. Cully deliver a two-headed calf (in the best scene here), the bad omens begin piling up. When Poe's story of "The Black Cat" seems to be coming to pass in Dr. Cully's own person, John Charles opens his cache of Poe letters and notes, looking for insight. Julie holds moonlit rites and dances naked, and the Reverend Rollie Fairchild whips up the town's antiwitch fever. Finally, Julie discovers a buried ax, seemingly having the missing Margaret's hair and blood on it. A town meeting is called, and some demand that Julie be arrested—or at least run out of Crowley Creek. (The town's rabid feelings are the plot's most feeble device.) Then Dr. Cully starts hearing rats in his cellar behind a freshly bricked wall. John Charles has a drinking habit meant to mimic Poe's, but Poe had an allergy to, not a craving for, alcohol. Gentlemanly, undemanding variation on the master's work.

Kirkus Reviews

• "Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream."
• "The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame."
• "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?"

― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

From the Publisher