Summary Of Edgar Allen Poe's Horror Stories

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Many people enjoy watching horror films. However, those people usually do not know where the modern horror genre originated. Edgar Allen Poe creates fear and dread in his writing, and he is a pioneer of horror stories. Three of his stories are named A Tell-Tale Heart, Hop-Frog or The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs, and The Cask of Amontillado. In A Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator of the story wants to kill an old man that lives with him because the old man has a grotesque eye that bothers the narrator. However, the murder of the old man leads the narrator to insanity. Next, Hop-Frog or The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs is about a king who uses a dwarfed, crippled fool named Hop-Frog to help the king plan outrageous parties. However, due to the …show more content…
Through Poe’s writing, he creates fear and dread with the characters in A Tell-Tale Heart, the violence in Hop-Frog or The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs, and the setting in The Cask of Amontillado and A Tell-Tale Heart.
Initially, the most obvious source of fear and dread in the stories of Edgar Allen Poe is the characters. The Narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart is an excellent example of one of these characters. The Narrator creates a feeling of fear by being unreliable and insane. The narrator constantly insists that he is sane, but he then gives reasons for not being insane that contradict his actual belief. In the story, the narrator says, “I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” (Poe 303). At first, the reader believes that the narrator is a kind man who treats an old man nicely. However, the narrator then states that he killed the old man. This startling statement contradicts the fact that the narrator is sane because no sane person would ever kill another man, and the statement also adds fear to the story because the reader now knows that the old man will die …show more content…
Fear and dread created by setting are present in The Cask of Amontillado and A Tell-Tale Heart. In The Cask of Amontillado, there is a rapid change in setting. The story starts with a celebration of carnival. The festival is fun with bright colors and wine. But then, there is a quick change to the catacombs owned by Montresor. The rapid change in setting from fun to gloomy is jarring to the reader, and the change also accentuates the despair provided by the catacombs. Not only do the catacombs provide gloom to the story, but the also provide darkness. The area is so dark that a flambeau is needed to lighten the catacombs. Darkness is associated with fear because one cannot see in the dark. No person is sure of what is in an unknown void of darkness because it is impossible to see. This inability to see causes fear. Now, the most significant aspect about the catacombs is that they are, “lined with human remains…in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris” (Poe 212). The reader is startled by the presence of dead people in the catacombs. The bones provide dread to the setting and story because the reader associates bones with death, a dreadful topic. Fear and dread are created with setting additionally in A Tell-Tale Heart. To begin with, the story takes place entirely in the middle of the night. Just like in the catacombs of The Cask of Amontillado, the setting of A Tell-Tale Heart is dark. Nighttime
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