Tales of Horror and Suspense
Premature burial, madness, the yearning of the human heart. When it came to capturing our fears, aspirations and anxieties, Edgar Allan Poe is in a class of his own:
The Fall of the House of Usher is 19 pages long. The Pit and the Pendulum is even shorter. By the standards of your average novel, these hardly make the grade.
But, as
David Rush writes in my edition of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
– a title that seems especially menacing this week – these works deserve
inclusion “because it is simply impossible to imagine the modern novel without
considering Poe’s masterful writing”.
I need to
state here and now that I’ve never been a fan of the genre, in books or on
film. Case in point: I was so traumatized by descriptions of Hitchcock’s Psycho
that I only saw the film a few years ago – on TV, at a safe distance from the
television set, with my eyes squeezed shut during the shower scene.
So, yes,
when it comes to horror I’m a wuss. I attribute it to an overactive imagination
combined with a lifetime of watching the news: there are enough scary things
happening in real life without going out of your way to pay money to see them.
When I was
11, my best friend – I’ll call her Bonnie, because that was her name – loved
horror flicks. She was a tomboy and an athlete and I don’t think she had a
nervous bone in her body. She coaxed me into going with her to see The Fall
of the House of Usher, the first of Roger Corman’s popular series of films
based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t remember much about it because
I had my eyes shut during the scary bits – which comprised most of the movie.
The next
year, as if I hadn’t learned my lesson, Bonnie persuaded me to see The Pit
and the Pendulum. I kept my eyes open and had nightmares for a week.
Between 1960
and 1965, Corman made eight films loosely adapted from Poe’s stories; if they
were your introduction to Poe, as they were mine, you want to keep in mind that
the key word here is “loosely”. They were meant to be low-budget horror flicks,
and they were that, but they had Corman at the helm – who directed some 55
films, including The Little Shop of Horrors – and starred the inimitable
Vincent Price. They were well-made, for the most part – especially The
Masque of the Red Death – but they didn’t have much to do with the books.
To get back
to those, I have a bone to pick with the 1001 Books editors: if the
reason for including Poe is because of his influence on the modern novel, it
would make more sense to include either The Murders in the Rue Morgue or
The Purloined Letter. Or both. With these stories, and his amateur
sleuth, the Chevalier C. August Dupin, Poe created the template for the modern
detective novel. He wrote the rules, really: the concept of the armchair
detective who outwits the local police; the object hidden in plain sight,
invisible to everyone except, of course, the armchair detective; the concept of
solving a crime by observation and deduction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called him
“a model for all time”, and who are we to argue?
Poe’s horror
tales, on the other hand, draw on the Gothic horror tradition begun by Horace
Walpole in the 18th century and continued by Mary Shelley, Washington Irving,
and a host of others. Dark and suspenseful as they are, they’re not
groundbreaking. And if you’ve seen one dank, rat-infested, medieval dungeon –
well, you’ve seen them all.
Set in
Toledo, Spain, during the last days of the Inquisition, The Pit and the
Pendulum features an unnamed narrator who falls into a swoon after being
found guilty by a tribunal of white-lipped, black-robed judges. When he awakes
he’s in a damp, airless chamber, so dark he cannot see his hand in front of his
face. At first he fears he’s been locked in a tomb, but as he slowly feels his
way around the walls it becomes apparent that he’s been placed in one of
Toledo’s infamous dungeons. After he comes within inches of falling into a
deep, circular pit, he realizes that this was supposed to be his fate – to fall
into the abyss and drown.
Once again,
he loses consciousness. This time, when he awakes, he finds he’s been strapped
down to a wooden frame, facing the ceiling. Now there is just enough light to
allow him to see that a large pendulum with a razor-sharp edge is suspended
directly above him. It swings slowly back and forth, and begins to descend
towards his chest. At the last moment, with the aid of the scraps of meat left
out for him, he attracts the attention of the rats swarming up from the pit.
They crawl over his body, chewing away at the straps that tie him down, and
he’s able to slip free just in time.
The pendulum
is raised to the ceiling, and the walls of the dungeon become red-hot. They
begin to close in, pushing the prisoner closer to the edge of the pit. Just as
he’s about to lose his foothold and fall to his death, there’s a blast of
trumpets and the sound of voices shouting. The walls retreat, and an arm
catches him just before he falls: “The French army had entered Toledo. The
Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”
With The
Fall of the House of Usher Poe gives us another unnamed narrator, one who
arrives at the end of “a dull, dark, and soundless day” at the home of his
childhood friend, Roderick Usher. Usher has written to him, begging him to come
and see him in order to help alleviate some kind of mental disorder. The house
itself, which stands on the brink of a “black and lurid tarn”, is ancient, its
stones covered in fungus. Although the outer walls appear intact, he notices a
barely perceptible fissure extending from the roof of the building down to the
foundation.
His friend
is glad to see him but is obviously not well:
“Surely, man
had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick
Usher! . . . The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre
of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. His action was
alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous
indecision . . . to that species of energetic concision . . . which may be
observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the
periods of his most intense excitement.”
Usher
confides to his friend that he suffers from a nervous affliction, made worse,
he says, by his sister’s illness. The lady Madeleine is gradually wasting away,
to the despair of her doctors, who can find neither a cause nor a cure. Her
death, Usher says, will leave him “the last of the ancient race of the Ushers”.
Not long afterwards,
Usher announces that his sister has died. He plans to bury her temporarily in
the tombs underneath the house in order to keep her body away from the sinister
designs of the physicians. As grave-robbing was a fairly common practice on the
part of medical students, especially when the cause of death was “interesting”,
the narrator agrees to help carry her body down to the small, damp,
subterranean vault. At this point, he learns that the lady Madeleine and her
brother were twins – something you’d assume he’d know, seeing that he and
Roderick have been friends since boyhood.
But to
continue:
A week goes
by and Roderick become more and more uneasy. One stormy night, when the
narrator cannot sleep, Roderick comes to his door in a state of complete agitation.
He leads him to the window; looking out, they see that the house and grounds
are enveloped in a strange, luminous vapour. In an effort to distract him, the
narrator offers to read aloud. While he’s reading, he hears noises that match
the descriptions in the books – the cracking and ripping of a wooden door, a
dreadful, unnatural shriek, the clanging of a metal shield falling to the
floor. He leaps to his feet and rushes to where his friend is sitting, rigid
and staring at nothing, speaking softly and quickly, as if to himself.
“We have put
her living in the tomb,” he says. And then: “I tell you that she now stands
without the door!”
The door
blows open and there stands the lady Madeleine, blood on her robes, her
emaciated figure showing signs of some terrible struggle. With a low moan, she
falls onto Roderick, and brings him lifeless to the ground. Fearing for his
life, the narrator flees the building. He turns to see the house, in the light
of the “full, setting, and blood-red moon” begin to crack along its fissure,
eventually crumpling into the waters of the tarn.
A prolific
genius, Poe was one of the most influential American writers of all time. His
stories play on our deepest fears and anxieties – he knew about the dark bits
at our core and brought them to life in ways that remain relevant today.
As Stephen
King has put it, “Poe’s The Man. What more can I say?”
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