This past week, ahead of Penumbra’s Poe episode, reading Poe again, my first thought was, “What on earth can Miss Gough have been thinking?” Some of those are pretty scary stories. Perhaps she realized that Poe’s plots were no worse than the urban myths we kids would whisper in the dark during slumber parties, driving ourselves to fits of delicious, sleepless terror. Still, I doubt Poe would get a mention in fourth grade classes today. I imagine over-protective moms and school psychologists fearing emotional scarring would see to that.
Even though Poe’s stories are in some ways quite dated, for me, they still stir up sufficient plausible emotion that I can enjoy them as a toe-curling read. That surprised me, so I’ve given some thought to what it might be that gives Poe’s short stories such evocative power, even to me, a 21st century reader who likes to think she hasn’t a superstitious bone in her body. I should also say that I could count the works of horror fiction I’ve read on half a hand; I’ve tried to make a respectable list but after noting John Wyndham’s Jizzle, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, I ran out of puff. So, if you don’t mind, this article will be an honest appraisal from a virtual horror noob. With any luck, the result will bob to the surface fresh and perhaps even insightful, and not simply drown in a sad bucket of ignorance. Perhaps my observations of what works for me – and what doesn’t – might prove useful to some author somewhere. So here goes...
A lot of Poe’s short stories are written as first person narratives, and the narrator is always male. The plot unfolds as though it is being told, often conversationally, to the reader sometime after the events. Although we know from the start that the narrator survives his impending ordeal – here he is telling us about it – somehow that doesn’t detract from the power of being drawn through the narrative in a very personal way; we never stop wondering what will happen next. Because no omniscient narrator stands between the reader and the main character, we experience the action with him; Poe’s evocative writing has us imagining ourselves in his place. There is a grittiness about this style of narrative that reminds me of old detective novels, and indeed Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue is often credited as the first in the genre. Poe’s narrators are portrayed as ordinary men who find themselves involved in something extraordinary. This connection with a recognizable everyman provides the narrative believability; we can hear the voice of the person at the centre, which makes our access to his inner dialogue and emotions seem perfectly natural. We feel what the narrator feels, as he feels it. I like that.
Poe often leaps into the story with a start. The Tell-Tale Heart begins,
“TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
as though the two of us have been conversing for some time already and we have just got to the good bit. It’s effective, and throws us into the plot with little time to catch our breath. Other times Poe addresses us more formally, and we feel we are reading a diary or journal account of the tale. Either way, Poe causes us as readers to quickly feel we are present in the action; and that is no mean feat.
Readers are sucked into Poe’s vortex of horror with what seems to be very little effort. Although his narrators often begin with protestations of rationality, they are all prone to attacks of superstitious jitters given spooky surroundings, and weird happenings. Often they admit repeatedly that their fears are baseless – and all of the circumstances related can be explained by coincidence or natural phenomena – yet they are not able to throw off an abiding feeling of dread. Poe’s skillful manipulation of common human fears, in reality, leads his readers into a shared attack of the heebie-jeebies, which, strangely, is compounded by the narrator’s pooh-poohing of his imaginings. Although the stories are macabre, they seem familiar. Who hasn’t got the willies jumping at shadows alone in some dark and spidery place? As Poe’s protagonist describes a growing and inexplicably visceral fear, we empathise with his crumbling mental faculties, and his incapacity to assert his reason to reverse the process. To experience terror at the imagined horrors of the unknown is a very human response.
Poe’s timing is near-perfect. He seems to have an uncanny sense of just how long he ought to string the reader along with creepy details and descriptions of inner cogitations before giving us something real to worry about. It’s as though Poe is aware that the more nervous the reader becomes, the faster they scan the text. As suspense mounts, often Poe produces long passages of description that the reader rushes through, eyes darting from one object to another in growing panic. He stretches those moments out just long enough to torment the readers’ nerves without irritating them to a point of unpleasantness. I imagine him slowing his emotional responses down so that they keep step as he handwrites the passage to suit the heightened emotions of his future reader. However he achieved it, Poe certainly had the knack. I was never bored, but always held at just the right level of tingliness in each moment.
One of Poe’s greatest talents is in employing evocative language to involve the senses of the reader; he makes us feel as present in the events of the story as any writer I know. A great deal of this sensual imagery is visual. Take this description from The Fall of the House of Usher:
“...the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode....”
Poe paints a picture of Gothic gloom, and although the rattling armour seems a cliche to the contemporary reader, in the context of the story, and even with the narrator smacking down his superstitious mental wanderings, it has an undeniably creepy effect. Decaying, dilapidated settings speak of the wrongness of the place; light and cheer are always absent as the material environment reflects the horror of the tale. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the story begins with the narrator regaining consciousness in a space filled with impenetrable darkness and Poe evokes feelings of dread through descriptions that involve senses other than sight. The pit emits a “clammy vapour, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus”; the stone walls are “smooth, slimy and cold”, the ground “moist and slippery”; we hear with the protagonist the tiny skitterings of the feet of approaching rats. These sensual descriptions are detailed, believable and never dull.
A truly great aspect of Poe’s horror stories is that every circumstance can be explained away without resorting to supernatural influence or the presence of mythical beasties. In The Black Cat, the arrival of a feline of very similar appearance to the narrator’s formerly tortured pet can easily be explained by co-incidence. Even the growth of white hairs in the shape of a gallows on the cat’s chest would attract little comment without the gin-addled, guilt-stricken mind of the narrator attaching meaning to it. Poe allows us to experience the prickle of fear such coincidences provoke, and then stands back while they lead us away to awful imaginings he never enunciates directly. A peculiar gentleman who mutter to himself in “gutteral tones” excites the universal dread of the insane; the ravages of alcohol abuse we know will lead to perverse and cruel acts against innocents; the dreadful consequences that follow those acts we imagine are a supernatural retribution; the horrible deaths in Murders in the Rue Morgue seem to have been perpetrated by a super-human, who turns out to be a cranky, knife-wielding orangutan. But these natural revelations are never a let down. Readers play along, aware of Poe’s sleight of hand, but allowing our own imaginations to become part of the story, our suspicions tools that Poe wields to develop terrors in our minds instead of plainly on the page.
But not every feature of Poe’s stories is as effective for the contemporary reader as it may have been for readers in the mid-19th century. We no longer believe that a person’s physiognomy unfailingly reveals their mental, emotional and moral state. Modern medicine has removed the dread of infection and fever; a “ghastly pallor of the skin” and “peculiar lustre of the eye” are unlikely to be viewed as harbingers of death, but as easily fixed with a Tylenol and a wee lie down. Unkempt hair and clothing no longer speaks of madness, drunkenness, or other morally questionable states. Thanks to 1940s cinema, depictions of an insane character ‘improvising mad dirges’ on an organ strike us as laughable, as does the frequent swoonings of the narrator in The Pit and the Pendulum (did people ever really faint away with fright?).
Poe’s original audiences would likely have been mostly Christian and this is apparent in his use of metaphors and imagery that would have caused his religious readers to worry at things that we do not. It is likely that they would have, for example, found it believable that the Usher household suffered from a “constitutional and family evil”. Poe’s descriptions in The Fall of the House of Usher of a “sulphureous lustre [which] lay over all” evokes well-known literary visions of hell, then believed to be a real and very much feared destination for the damned. It’s an oversimplification, but it is possible that in The Black Cat Poe’s early readers would have seen the narrator’s banging on the wall inside which he had interred his wife and so giving away his dread secret as a fair example of pride coming before a fall. Indeed, Christian morals abound in Poe’s writings once you start looking.
But those “flaws” notwithstanding Poe’s stories have endured because they are simply what we in Australia would call “bloody good yarns”. Poe spins us tales that trick, torment and ¬– even today – retain a power to shock, and better, surprise us just a little. Firmly rooted in a reality of sorts, and without the lashings of graphic gore upon which some contemporary authors rely, Poe draws us in, frightens us, and sends us on our way wondering how it was he managed to achieve that end with such simple devices. After reading them again, I was left with the firm impression that Poe’s stories contain many lessons from which modern horror writers could learn. Write me a contemporary version of The Black Cat and I’ll be happy to add it to my shelf.
Jane Douglas is a freelance writer, student and intern with Penumbra EMag. She lives with a tribe of children and way too many animals in Queensland, Australia.
