Fancy a scare this summer? Then Poe’s collection of gothic stories are for you. Each short story is wildly different, with a range of creepy characters and surreal settings. If you are a fan of BBC Two’s ‘Inside No. 9’ then you’ll like this.
‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ follows a prisoner as he navigates his way round a dark and gloomy prison, while ‘The Oval Portrait’ tells the story of an artist who allows his love for his work to overcome that for his wife – with disastrous consequences.
‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ is the perfect contrast to a sunny day in Weston Park. It explores a subject which has fascinated humans for as long as we can remember: the possibility of cheating death. Many people today believe in the power of hypnosis, which was also something of a hot trend in the 1840s, when Poe was writing. The tale’s unnamed protagonist is fascinated by the Mesmerism movement, a type of hypnosis in which a person is put into a trance. It was claimed that people could be made to sing, dance, walk etc. The narrator wants to discover what would happen if a person was mesmerised ‘in articulo mortis’, meaning at the point of death. Somewhat surprisingly, he manages to convince his dying friend and titular character M. Valdemar to be part of his experiment. What the men discover is both horrifying and intriguing.
It could be assumed that hoaxes and fake news are something of the digital age; however, in reality people have been attempting to fool each other since the dawn of time. Poe submitted the Valdemar story to The American Review and The Broadway Journal simultaneously in the hope that readers would believe it was real. The fact that many were taken in may sound ridiculous to a modern audience, but at the time people’s belief in the power of alternative science was strong. A doctor called John Elliotson even held lectures in which he performed live Mesmerism experiments.
The fact that Poe tried to pull the wool over people’s eyes is just one example of his eccentricities. Others include the fact he often wrote with his pet cat Catterina perched on his shoulder. This is in part what makes his work so interesting – his rather quirky tales give an insight into another era but also have a timeless air. Just the thing to read while sipping an iced tea in the garden.