Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Terror and Madness

“There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.”

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the passage above to describe the interior décor of Prince Prospero’s castle in “The Masque of the Red Death,” but he might just as easily have written it to describe the contents of this book. Its nineteen stories abound with characters—among them gibbering madmen, ominous doppelgängers, walled-up victims, and living-dead corpses—whos...