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The five stories in this collection represent different facets
of Poe’s writing. Three of them, The Fall of the House of
Usher, The Maelström and The Barrel of Amontillado are
horror stories, rich in atmosphere and gothic detail. The
other two, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Stolen
Letter are detective stories, amongst the earliest examples
of this popular genre.
The Fall of the House of Usher
A man visits a former school friend and finds that both
he and his sister, Madeline, are near to death. They are
suffering from a strange illness that seems in some way
connected to the house, which had been passed down
through this wealthy family for generations. A few days
after the old school friend arrives, Madeline dies and the
two men bury her in a tomb under the house. However,
it transpires that she is merely in a coma and they have
buried her alive. She comes back during a terrible storm
and both she and her brother die, bringing an end to the
Usher family and also to the house itself, which crashes to
the ground.
The Maelström
In this story, a fisherman relates how he and his brothers
were sucked into a terrible whirlpool and how he alone
managed to escape death by tying himself to a water
barrel. The experience frightened him so much that his
physical appearance changed dramatically. His black hair
turned white and his body weak, like that of an old man.
The Barrel of Amontillado
In this story, the madman Montresor wants to punish
a man named Fortunato for the terrible things he has
supposedly done. Montresor tricks Fortunato into going
with him to some caves under his house on the pretext of
inspecting a barrel of wine. Once there, Montresor gets
Fortunato drunk and ties him to some metal rings in a
small cave. Then he builds a wall across the front of the
cave and leaves Fortunato there to die.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
This is a detective story starring C. Auguste Dupin, a
character similar to Sherlock Holmes, who is able to solve
crimes that have baffled the French police. In this tale,
two women, mother and daughter, are found brutally
murdered on the fourth floor of their house in the Rue
Morgue. The daughter is found, covered in blood and
badly bruised, up the chimney and the mother is found in
the yard, her head almost completely cut off. Witnesses,
who entered on the ground floor, claim to have heard
the voice of a Frenchman and another high-pitched
unintelligible voice coming from the room where the
daughter was found. However, when police entered the
room, there was nobody there and they fail to explain
how the suspected murderers could possibly have left the
house without being detected. Dupin inspects the house
and concludes that the second voice did not belong to a
human being, rather to an orang-utan, which could easily
have escaped from the fourth floor window. He puts a
note in the local newspaper saying that the orang-utan
has been caught, thus tricking the owner, a French sailor,
into going to his house to reclaim it. The mystery is solved
when we discover that the orang-utan had gone mad,
escaped and murdered the two women.
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