by Edgar Allan Poe

isbn: 0804900086
subject: Fiction and Literature, Short Stories
finished: Early Fall 1997

The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado defined horror for me when I was in grade school (thank goodness I discovered Poe before Stephen King). I picked up this collection soon after starting The Gold Bug Variations because for some reason I never read The Gold Bug. It's a neat little story about codebreaking and treasure hunting (a substitution cipher is naive today, but I suppose it would have been fairly secure at the time). Poe writes great horror that has aged fairly well, although since that one Simpsons episode it's hard to take The Raven seriously.