My last post about Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque led a couple of readers pointing me to places where the missing tale (“The Visionary”) could be read online. That fact is beside the point. I have sitting next to me an omnibus edition that contains, in print form, all of Poe’s tales and poems. Poe deserves to be read in print. No, the point of that previous post was that I wanted to read a print version of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque through so that I could observe a couple of things: the stories Poe thought his best at the time, and to read several Poe stories I never had. Also, it was an exercise of ratiocination. So I found a used copy online that contains the full contents, unaltered, of the original printing. Such a book may be still in print, but given the constraints mentioned in my previous post, it cannot easily be found. So on to the stories.
A great number of the stories contained herein are funny. Poe was quite capable of humorous writing. Some of the stories verge on science fiction. Others demonstrate his incredible breadth of reading. He wrote smartly about ancient history—fictionalized, of course—and about astronomy. He wrote a story about the end of the world, which adheres, in some measure, to the “biblical” account known even in his day. The stories are erudite and often obscure. They are seldom read, or at least discussed among Poe’s horror tales. I’ve been pondering horror as a category quite a lot as of late. It’s clear that during his lifetime Poe was not a “horror writer” as we know such authors today. He was a brilliant, and imaginative interrogator of the world in which he lived. Reading this book all the way through was an epiphany.
Poe’s writings are in the public domain. There are websites, easily found, where all of his stories may be located for free. There are some writers, however, that I believe have earned the honor of being read as they were published—on paper. Until recently I had only a couple of editions of paperbacks of Poe’s stories. They were mostly tales I had read multiple times, here and there. I even break out the omnibus edition now and again when I want to read one of his stories that aren’t in the other collections. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque has expanded my view, which often happens when I read Poe. And that is a high compliment to any author, just like reading them in paper form.
