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Tales to Make Your Skin Crawl (Science Fiction Collection)
Tales to Make Your Skin Crawl - Science Fiction Collection Author:Edgar Allan Poe The most important American author of the macabre, Poe's horror stories are timeless in their ability to chill the listener. In The Black Cat (1843) the narrator relates his gradual slide into alcoholism, despair and murder. Is the black cat who has been his longtime friend a fiend sent to haunt him, or a coincidental bit player in his... more » life? The line between the natural and the supernatural is sometimes so thin that it is sometimes hard to tell if or when we've crossed it. The Cask of Amontillado (1846) tells of a feud between two Italian noblemen, and the lengths they will go to in order to destroy one another. On the pretext of tasting a fine wine, one leads another down into a deep cellar with murder in his heart. But the outcome is not as he expects, and the story ends with a poignancy that reaffirms their similarities more than their differences. Fall of the House of Usher (1839) chronicles the final days of Roderick Usher. Living in his gloomy mansion, oppressed by a huge collection of fears, ill with real and imagined diseases, he is a figure of despair amid affluence. Step by step, he brings upon himself the disasters he has dreamed of, as his own dark broodings squeeze out every normal human pursuit. In The Masque of Red Death (1842), a hideous plague is sweeping the country . Those afflicted die in terrible pain within half an hour, their faces suffused with blood. Prince Prospero barricades himself and a thousand of his healthiest followers in a great abbey and welds the door shut to ward off the plague. But at the height of their merrymaking, the Red Death strikes at the center of the courtiers.« less