The 25 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

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Amongst Poe's literary obsessions (which included hypnosis, superstition, and moral ambiguity), his preoccupation with being buried alive might be the most fascinating.

The narrator of "The Premature Burial" is equally entranced by the concept, but his fear has a discernible source: He often falls into a catatonic state that he fears will be mistaken for death and leave him in the predicament of being stuck in the ground way too early. Our narrator lives to tell his story, but not before confronting his debilitating phobia in a surprisingly subdued twist.

In this predecessor to the modern-day, psychologically twisted reality show, My Strange Obsession, Poe tackles what happens when we face our worse fears, and wonders if we can become better from our efforts.

Ever find yourself growing tired of the person you're in love with? When this story's narrator first met his wife, Morella, his heart "burned with fires it had never before known," but before long he starts to lose that loving feeling for his intellectual wife. Her obsession with mystical writings begins to grate on him; soon, our narrator says he can "no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers" and finds that "the most beautiful became the most hideous."

Much to his relief, Morella kicks the bucket, but in the throes of death, she gives birth to a baby girl who grows up to look, act, and talk exactly like her mother. But instead of being on a Birth tip, her father is so terrified of the young incarnation of his deceased wife that he doesn't even give the kid a name.

Finally, when she's ten-years-old, Dad decides it's time to baptize and name her. The priest asks for the child's name, and he helplessly utters "Morella," at which point his daughter screams, "I am here!" and falls dead. The creepiest part, though? When Dad goes to bury his daughter next to her mother, he finds that there's no body in her tomb, suggesting Morella might have come back for revenge on her loveless husband.

Touted as the first-ever detective story, Poe's classic "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" centers on Parisian C. Auguste Dupin, who lays down the framework for future fictional detectives, most notably good ol' Sherlock Holmes, in this masterfully weaved tale.

The tale's narrator is the basis of all future Watson-like characters, the storyteller and a sounding-board for the more brilliant detective, and analytical genius, Dupin. The pair read about a murder nearby: Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille, have both been killed, and all of their money and belongings have been left in the house, ruling out robbery as a motive

The neighbors do have one insight into the grisly crime, however. They heard two voices in the apartment at the time of the murder, one which they assume to be French, and the other indefinably foreign. The police are befuddled, but Dupin swoops in and outwits them, deducing that the murderer is not a man at all but a...

Chill, we're not going to spoil the outrageous conclusion. We'll let you take on Poe's puzzle for yourself and see if you can match the analytical prowess of the Poe's detective. 

Poe gifts us with another mystery in "The Gold Bug,"  a brilliant blend of folklore and fiction. But he decides to leave his frequent protagonist Detective Dupin in the dust, instead deploying southerner William Legrand to unravel the puzzle at hand.

In what's basically a buried treasure story, Legrand finds the titular gold bug, a scaraboeus, and is soon after bitten by the creature. Still, he's convinced it will lead him to the desired bounty and emphatically expresses this to his servant Jupiter, who thinks the scarab has poisoned his mind to the point of insanity. We're convinced, too, until Legrand solves an elaborate cryptogram (to which Poe owed much of the story's success; liken it to the modern day Soduku craze), which leads him to serious bundle of cash.

Ironically, "The Gold Bug" earned Poe the most money he earned in his lifetime, $100 for a three-part-installment in the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper (double irony!). 

What you call impulse, Poe calls "The Imp of the Perverse," a delightfully creepy little phrase that describes our inclination to do the wrong thing just because it's wrong; as in, putting our hand on the stove right after mom has told us not to.

Poe's narrator, confined to a prison cell, explores this "innate and primitive principle," and, in one of the writer's most widely accessible passages, even attributes procrastination to this self-destructive impulse. It is, after all, a behavior which know will cause us pain, that we willing thrust upon ourselves. College, anyone?

"The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action... It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle."

He totally has us with him until he uses this to segue into admitting that he is in jail because he murdered his neighbor with a poisonous candle, a fact that went undetected until a perverse "maddening desire to shriek aloud" a confession of his crime landed him in jail.

Leave it to Poe to captivate us with a profound idea only to carry it out to a completely illogical, insane conclusion.

The possibly autobiographical "Eleonora" is a love story which many people assume is about Poe's ill-fated wife (and cousin, who he married when he was 26 and she was 13), Virginia.

The source of the comparison lies on the narrator's similar situation: He's a man who falls in love with his cousin in the Garden-of-Eden-like "Valley of the Many-Colored Grass." Shortly after, in a predictably Poe-like fashion, his object of affection becomes fatally ill and begs the narrator to never leave the valley they fell in love in, and to never love another. He promises he will never leave and never remarry, and then proceeds to do exactly that not long after she dies.

The most improbable element of the story: Eleonora returns from death to give her thumbs-up on the whole ordeal ("Thou art absolved for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven."). Was his real life wife this forgiving? No wonder he married the chick!

Poe's most psychologically compelling story, "William Wilson" explores the ways in which we wrestle with the contradictions within ourselves and how we view our own flaws.

We meet William Wilson as a young boy, when he meets a boy in his school who shares his name, dresses just like him, and even shares the same birthday (and, incidentally, the same birthday as Poe himself). William is annoyed by the boy; his new companion is bossy, tells him what to do, and imitates his voice, though he can't speak louder than a whisper. Thus, he plans an attack on the other William Wilson, but when he sneaks into the kid's bedroom he finds his rival's face has changed, and what he sees terrifies him.

William meets the second William again when he begins conning people at gambling. William #2 exposes his vice, forcing him to leave Oxford. The last time William sees his tormentor, he is at a masquerade bash; there, he finds William #2 dressed in the same costume, and, furious at his presence, he decides to stab him. After the murder happens, William looks into a mirror and sees himself bleeding before hearing his rival admit defeat: “In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

Many people point to this compelling tale of dual selves as one of Poe's most personal, as William shares a birthday with Poe and is afflicted by the same gambling addiction which forced Poe to leave the University of Virginia after just one semester. Did Poe, like William, assassinate his own conscience so that his vices could reign supreme? Being that Poe reportedly died of "brain swelling," which was a euphemism for alcoholism at the time, it seems like an unfortunate possibility.

Need proof that Poe had a sense of humor? Look no further than "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether," the author's comical venture into an insane asylum. Unsurprisingly, Poe captures the insanity part particularly well.

Poe flexes his funny bone (in his own weird way) through this story of a traveler who visits a French mental institution. The head doctor, Monsieur Maillard, takes the narrator on a tour, warning him: "Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see." The narrator is then invited to dinner at the insane asylum, where he's surrounded by a gang of strange characters who are all bizarrely dressed.

He learns that the asylum's previous method of treating patients, which allowed the patients to wander freely, was ultimately abandoned because the patients rebelled on the staff, capturing them and treating them as patients. He is also told that since the incident, no one has been allowed into the hospital, save for a "very stupid-looking young gentleman."

Poe's "crazy posing as sane" act is employed in many of his stories, but never so literally as it is in this crazy little tale of rebellious patients "tarring and feathering" the staff.

Teeth take on a gruesomely Gothic form in "Berenice," a strange little story about a man who marries his own cousin and reveals a creepy fetish for for her pearly whites.

His cousin, who he describes as a "fantastic beauty," is afflicted by a strange disease that causes her appearance to deteriorate, as well as sporadic catatonic episodes. While she suffers from this affliction, the narrator becomes obsessed with her teeth, which, somehow, have resisted the disease. In a particularly creepy scene, he describes how her teeth "disclosed themselves slowly to [his] view" and laments that he "never beheld them."

Berenice dies, and he later learns that her grave has been plundered and she was found still alive. He then becomes captivated by a box by his bed, and notices his clothes are caked in dirt. He opens the box and finds an even smaller box containing 32 "white and ivory-looking substances," which he realizes are his wife's teeth.

We didn't actually pull (pun totally intended!) anything from Poe's horrific tale, but we did Google-search "tooth fetish" and find that it has a name (odontophilia), and, apparently, it actually exists! So, there's that.

One of Poe's particular gifts is the ability to tell a wild story through the words of a narrator who seems calm and ordinary, a person you could encounter in everyday life, which is probably why he was able to successfully convince readers that "The Balloon Hoax" was a true story.

Poe submitted this intricately detailed story (which included many technically sound details and the names of several real people) about a man who miraculously crosses the Atlantic Ocean in only three days in a hot air balloon to The Sun. The newspaper then published the story with this headline: "ASTOUNDING NEWS! BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS! SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON'S FLYING MACHINE!!!"

The story caused the newspaper's New-York-based building to be overrun by excited readers, but was quickly revealed to be a hoax and retracted just two days later. Still, Poe's efforts were successful in so far that he had convinced many people that his tale was true and he proudly observed that he had "never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper."

Much like "The Cask of Amontillado," "Hop-Frog" is, at his heart, about the nature of revenge; in this case, the vengeful subject is the king's favorite jester, a dwarf named Hop-frog.

The king invites Hop-Frog and his closest friend, a fellow dwarf named Tripetta, over and forces Hop-Frog to drink wine, even though the narrator notes that Hop-Frog was not a fan of drinking because it "excited the poor cripple almost to madness." Triepetta tries to stop the king, but he cruelly pushes her down and throws wine in her face. Hop-Frog is enraged, but, rather than showing his anger, he plays a prank of his own on the king. He convinces the king and his cabinet to dress like "Ourang-Outangs," which he says will scare the women. They agree, and the dwarf parades them, chained together, at the masquerade ball, and proceeds to set them all on fire in front of the crowd.

Poe closes his bloody midget revenge story with these brilliant last words: “This is my last jest.” Seriously, what more could you want?

Poe makes a unique observation on the often hazy line between life and art in his shortest short story, "The Oval Portrait."

A reversal of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, "The Oval Portrait" finds our narrator telling us about an entrancing painting of a beautiful woman he finds in an abandoned mansion (a gloomy structure which he notes the queen of Gothic Ann Radcliffe would approve of). He finds a book that details the house's artwork, which describes how the artist of the painting neglected his wife, being so entrenched in his work. Unaware of the pain he put on his young wife, he literally draws the life out of her for his painting, finishing his masterpiece to find her dead, her liveliness having been imparted on the painting itself.

Poe's tale seems to critique not only the danger of over-emphasizing the importance of art but also the world's over-focus on work, in general. So, workaholics, take note, and quit neglecting your lady in favor of your 9-to-5! (For further commentary on this subject, see Kanye's touching song on the matter.)

In a departure from his heavy leaning toward horror, this short story shows Poe's quirky, irony-heavy sense of humor. 

On the surface, "The Spectacles" claims to be about "love at first sight," but what it actually recounts in a silly little fable in which the narrator becomes enamored with a woman he sees from a distance, while not wearing his spectacles. He spends much of the story discussing the woman's beauty "the most exquisite [he] had ever beheld." He tells his friends about the women who caught his eyes, and woos her from afar before eventually proposing marriage. Her only request of him is that he wear his glasses on their wedding night. When he finally puts his spectacles on, he finds his young hot thing is actually an 82-year-old woman, and worse yet, his own great-great-grandmother, "grinning and foaming."

Poe's narrator learns an important lesson after his "love at first sight" experience, concluding that he will "never again be met without SPECTACLES." A latter-day mention to beer goggles, perhaps?

Long before the SyFy channel dug its talons into the American psyche, Poe grabbed a foothold into the genre with a quirky little story called "A Descent Into The Maelström."

In what's essentially A Perfect Storm with a Twilight Zone twist, the tale's narrator, a frail, silver-haired man, tells us about how his fishing ship got caught in an unfathomably powerful whirlpool, and recounts how the maelström swallowed the boat and his brothers whole. The narrator uses his deductive prowess to survive, but with one cavaeat: He now appears as feeble old man. The Maelström seems to have stolen his youth.

Is this the embellished yarn the product of senility, or has the "old" man witnessed a seemingly implausible natural phenomenon, doomed to be wrongly deemed a liar for the rest of his days? Poe leaves it to us to decide.

The idea of "making a deal with the devil" has taken on a great number of incarnations, but no Fasutian bargain could outdo the morally ambiguous protagonist in "Never Bet the Devil Your Head."

The story's narrator, who only acts as an observer in the tale, tells us about an immoral guy, aptly named Toby Dammit, who is riddled with a litany of vices, including a penchant for gambling. Toby's obsessive gambling escalates to the point that he begins betting on minor incidents, and in lieu of wagering money, instead takes to saying, "I'll bet the devil my head," putting his neck on the line for meaningless bets.

One day, the narrator is traveling with Toby and he bets the narrator he can leap over a turnstile in the distance, and bets the devil his head he can clear it. Suddenly, a "little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect" appears and urges Toby to make the jump. Toby takes the jump,  falls backwards mid-leap, and the old man hobbles up to his fallen figure and runs away with something. The narrator finds that Toby has been beheaded by a metal bar that was right over the turnstile, but his head is nowhere to be found.

This satire is Poe's response to critics who, at the time, condemned his writing as amoral. While the story's original subtitle, "A Tale With a Moral," seemed to denote it as a direct response to those claims, the subject matter dismisses the argument that literature should have moral responsibility.

The premise of "The Black Cat," as in several of Poe's stories, hinges on one underlying question: Is our narrator sane? The unnamed man awaiting his death sentence tells us a story of "mere household events" as if he's going to rattle off a anecdote about something that happened at dinner. He then proceeds to mentally unhinge right before our eyes, yet throughout the story his rational tone always suggests the semblance of sanity.

The ultimate object of our narrator's undoing? His favorite pet, a black cat who dotingly follows him around, and whose eye he cuts out in a moment of drunken fury. The narrator tries to reason with us about the incident, dismissing it as some Freudian impulse: "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?" And, he has us a going for a moment (who hasn't done the bad-just-because thing?); that is, until "the spirit of perverseness" consumes him, and he unleashes his bloody fury on his unsuspecting wife.

In the end, the narrator's own guilt is the cause of his demise, and we're left contemplating his motives: Was he a sane man gone maniacal, or a maniac incredibly well-versed in seeming sane?

Poe's greatest success with "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is that he managed to convince the world that it was a true story. It's about a man who undergoes hypnosis at the very moment of death, prompting countless letters of people demanding to know more about what they believed was a scientific experiment.

Why was Poe's story so well-received as truth? As the title indicates, the facts of M. Valdemar's condition are laid down in a very matter-of-fact manner, allowing us to trust the narrator's observations of his patient who buoys between the realms of death and life in terrible detail. Though there may be too much detail if you're weak stomached, as Poe enumerates every oozing orifice explicitly and unflinchingly.

It's Poe's unflinching attention to the particulars of "the case" that prompted Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning to give props to Poe for "making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar."

Another one of Poe's sci-fi adventure stories, "MS. Found in a Bottle" draws on spectacular events caused by nature, and, much like "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," revolves around a enormous whirlpool with supernatural properties.

A narrator recounts an at-sea story of a typhoon that spurred a whirlpool so large the ship he was on was almost swallowed entirely, before being suspended in a vortex of water that "rage[d] with unabated violence" and knocking everyone off the boat except for the narrator and an old Swedish guy. A red light cuts through the darkness, and the two see a black ship riding the water, which an errant waves thrusts them onto. It's on this mystery-enshrouded ship, where the crew seem to be oblivious to the narrator's presence, that he writes the message he puts into the bottle of his ultimately fatal foray aboard the southbound ship, whose sail reads "DISCOVERY."

Poe submitted his short story of this perplexing journey into the sea to a writing content advertised in a Baltimore periodical, and snagged the win and a $50 prize for his efforts.

C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's trailblazing detective (who also makes an appearance in both "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt") returns in this tidy little mystery about a letter that's sneakily swapped out for another.

The owner of the purloined letter is a woman of royal order, who has the sensitive material stolen by a government man named Minister D——; he uses the information he gathers from the letter to blackmail the lady. Dupin dukes it out alongside the Parisian police to find the letter and return it to its owner, and ultimately Dupin emerges victorious thanks to his superior intellect, which he uses to discern the letters whereabouts.

While the story purposely avoids the graphic, gory details Poe often utilizes in his other works, "The Purloined Letter" does have one trademark Poe touch: It completely leaves out what the letter is actually about! Poe delves into Dupin's search with great detail, yet never reveals why we should care about the actual letter. To his credit, the story is so engaging that we still get wrapped up in it.

Many of Poe's stories reveal their macabre nature in vivid, devilish detail, but "The Pit and The Pendulum" rests on the fear of the unknown, our terror mounting with each descriptor Poe withholds. 

Poe introduces readers to yet another unnamed narrator, this one having been imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition and, presumably, awaiting death. He awakes to finds himself in a dark cell and is forced to discern his surroundings with his limited sense and reasoning alone. As the titular torture device, a swinging pendulum in the shape of the Grim Reaper's scythe, inches down towards his chest, our hearts race with the narrator's scanning our imagination for a way around his impending death.

Modern-day horror flicks that rely on graphic scenes of savagery could learn a thing or two from Poe, who unleashes more dread with the possibility of death than most movies could with a slew of blood-soaked scenes.

On the surface, "Ligeia" seems to be the same story as "Morella": The narrator's intellectual wife dies and then lives again. So what's the principle difference? The narrator here, rather than being relived by his wife's death, is heartbroken. This subtle difference makes "Ligeia" a love story, albeit a very creepy one.

Our narrator's love, the titular woman, is a dark-haired beauty who becomes ill. Right before Ligeia dies, she reads a poem of Poe's, "The Conqueror Worm" (1843), about demonic worm-like creatures who eat mimes limb by limb, which symbolizes the perversity of nature and the inevitability of decay. Her poem proves true when the narrator remarries and his second wife, Rowena, also becomes fatally ill. For a brief moment after Rowena dies, her corpse reanimates and takes the form of Ligeia.

Again, Poe leaves us with unanswered questions. Has Ligeia really risen from the dead, or has she merely risen in the narrator's imagination? This inscrutability of Ligeia's resurrection merits a dozen re-readings of Poe's uncomfortably romantic tale. 

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is Poe's take on the quintessential haunted house tale, but, of course, with a macabre twist. The titular house acts as a character in the story; it's a decaying mansion with "an atmosphere of sorrow" that ensnares its inhabitants, even if they enter willingly.

The house belongs to the narrator's childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who has called his pal to his side because he's feeling mentally and physically uneasy. At the house, the narrator meets Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, who is also very ill, and whose existence the narrator was previously unaware of. Madeline dies shortly after the narrator meets her, and he and Roderick bury her in a tomb beneath the house. Madeline's death seems to ignite the house's inherent evil— neon gases are seen floating its perimeter, and Roderick becomes distraught, eventually admitting that he fears he may have buried his sister alive.

The chill-inducing conclusion, which results in the literal and figurative collapse of the Usher house, leaves us wondering just what about that house made it so damn malevolent. Poe, as he has a habit of doing, never explains.

Poe's Gothic masterpiece, "The Masque of the Red Death" explores themes of death and vanity that weave themselves throughout most of his work, a fear Poe may have honed in on in at this time in particular due to his wife Virginia being in the throes of tuberculosis. Not that he ever needed an excuse to be morbid, though.

The story takes place in Prince Prospero's castle, where the royal character is having a lavish masquerade to distract himself from the Red Death, a plague ravaging the population outside the castle's walls. In an intriguing decor choice, Prospero chooses to cloak each room in a single color, inciting fear in the guests of a particular room that is doused in a scarlet hue. As the party goes on, an intruder appears with a physical appearance that unleashes a gruesome effect upon those who come in contact with him.

Chilling and thought-provoking, Poe's classic tale interrogates the identity of death in a way few have since.

Proving Poe's ability to instill terror in just about anything, "The Cask of Amontillado" manifests horror through a couple of winos. The narrator, Montresor, exacts revenge on his friend Forunato, using his wine connoisseurship to achieve his terrifying ends.

Montresor preys on his friend's vanity, telling him about a rare vintage of Spanish wine, Amontillado, which Fortunato volunteers himself to taste, believing he is the only one who could verify its authenticity. Fortunato, ironically dressed as a jester, accompanies Montresor to his wine vault, a winding set of catacombs that unknowingly lead to his death. Montresor takes advantage of the Fortunato's drunken state and easily chains him to a wall in a niche, where he proceeds to kill Fortunato's buzz by sealing him into the wall with stones, and even throws a torch in with him to seal the deal further.

Poe's most sinisterly brilliant detail? We never learn why exactly Montresor kills Fortunato; all that's mentioned is that Fortunato "ventured upon insult," leaving us to wonder if Montresor is either extremely sensitive or ape-shit crazy.

We can't say why, but amongst the things that haunted Poe, eyes seem to keep popping up (or popping out, as it is). Whether it's brown-eyed girls like "Ligeia," or the accusing eyes of The Black Cat, Poe often portrays narrators who are intimidated by what lurks inside those dark sockets.

The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" takes it to another level, murdering a man for his incriminating peepers alone. Peep, pun intended, the horror: "He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye with film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up mi mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever."

The old man's eyes are the source of his unwarranted demise, but it's his beating heart that ultimately urge the deed, and, later, betray the narrator's guilt, in this darkly playful tale of paranoia.