If you have no taste for the Gothic, then Tales of Mystery and Imagination is not the book for you but if you’re prepared to put your rational mind on ‘hold’ and accept the world that Poe invites you into … you can easily get lost in the dark web he wove. It was, therefore, an enormous surprise to return to them and discover an entirely different book and an entirely different author. One or two of them – like The Masque of the Red Death – simply went straight over my head. My teenage self found them hard going – dark, ovewrought, over-written and just plain odd. I read Tales in its entirety thirty-five years ago at college and although I’ve dipped into them occasionally since then, I’ve never – until now – revisited the whole collection. … which is probably as fine a description of Poe’s stories as you’re ever likely to encounter. They are powered by what remains untold as much as by what Poe tells us, each of them split and shivered by a crack as deep and as dangerous as the fissure that runs from top to bottom of the gloomy house inhabited by Roderick and Madeline Usher. Poe’s stories – even his humorous tales, even his detective stories – are populated by amnesiacs and obsessives, by people doomed to remember what they desire only to forget, and are told be madmen and liars and lovers and ghosts. In his introduction to Bloomsbury’s striking new edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination Neil Gaiman says: These illustrations have been reprinted numerous times, most notably in London by Chancellor Press in 1985.) (source)Ĭonversation of Eiros and Charmion Descent into the Maelstrom Facts in the Case of M.Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe It was reprinted in New York by Tudor in 1933, 1935, 19. The book was so well received that it was reissued in 1923 with 8 additional illustrations in full color. The original edition comprised 24 black and white illustrations, plus front cover and spine illustration and 10 decorative tailpieces. (This famous and frequently copied collection features elaborate illustrations by Harry Clarke. Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London: George Harrap and New York: Brentanos, 1919.
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