The grisliness of revenge in “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Hop-Frog”; the loathsomeness of torture in “The Pit and the Pendulum”; successive waves of horror and death in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; extreme psychological aberration in “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd”—these and other tales show Poe to be a master of a psychological suspense that does not require the supernatural to engender fear.

Poe’s poems are also full of weirdness and horror, although here he had a far more distinguished array of predecessors, ranging from Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798) to Keats (Lamia, 1820) and including Goethe, Schiller, Sir Walter Scott, and many others. For all their familiarity, such poems as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” retain their power to terrify, while the unearthly landscapes of “The City in the Sea” and “Ulalume,” the bleak pessimism of “The Conqueror Worm” and “For Annie,” and the cosmic speculation of “Dream-Land” establish Poe as a touchstone for weird verse.

Poe’s influence on subsequent horror literature is incalculable. Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, and Walter de la Mare all the way down to Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Thomas Ligotti all owe a deep debt to Poe’s pioneering dissection of the psychology of terror, his deliberately frenetic and flamboyant prose, and the sheer originality of his weird conceptions. If any author can be said to have single-handedly founded the genre of weird fiction, that author is Edgar Allan Poe.

S. T. JOSHI

A NOTE ON TEXTS

The texts of Poe’s published works are in the public domain. This Penguin Horror volume was selected and edited in consultation with S. T. Joshi. Interested readers should turn to the Penguin Classics edition of The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (2006) for an introduction, chronology, notes, and bibliography by J. Gerald Kennedy.

Years listed on the contents page refer to dates of writing; multiple dates next to a title refer to revisions of that text.

THE
RAVEN

Tales

METZENGERSTEIN

Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero.

MARTIN LUTHER

orror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves—that is, of their falsity, or of their probability—I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity (as La Bruyère says of all our unhappiness) “vient de ne pouvoir ětre seuls.”*

But there are some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity. They—the Hungarians—differed very essentially from their Eastern authorities. For example, “The soul,” said the former—I give the words of an acute and intelligent Parisian—“ne demeure qu’une seule fois dans un corps sensible: au reste—un cheval, un chien, un homme màeme, n’est que la ressemblance peu tangible de ces animaux.”

The families of Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein had been at variance for centuries. Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly. The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy—“A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing.”

To be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning. But more trivial causes have given rise—and that no long while ago—to consequences equally eventful. Besides, the estates, which were contiguous, had long exercised a rival influence in the affairs of a busy government. Moreover, near neighbors are seldom friends; and the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing might look, from their lofty buttresses, into the very windows of the Palace Metzengerstein. Least of all had the more than feudal magnificence, thus discovered, a tendency to allay the irritable feelings of the less ancient and less wealthy Berlifitzings. What wonder, then, that the words, however silly, of that prediction, should have succeeded in setting and keeping at variance two families already predisposed to quarrel by every instigation of hereditary jealousy? The prophecy seemed to imply—if it implied anything—a final triumph on the part of the already more powerful house; and was of course remembered with the more bitter animosity by the weaker and less influential.

Wilhelm, Count Berlifitzing, although loftily descended, was, at the epoch of this narrative, an infirm and doting old man, remarkable for nothing but an inordinate and inveterate personal antipathy to the family of his rival, and so passionate a love of horses, and of hunting, that neither bodily infirmity, great age, nor mental incapacity, prevented his daily participation in the dangers of the chase.

Frederick, Baron Metzengerstein, was, on the other hand, not yet of age. His father, the Minister G———, died young. His mother, the Lady Mary, followed him quickly. Frederick was, at that time, in his eighteenth year.