His reputation as the father of the modern short story, even now, stems from a literary device that he called a “single effect” to capture and convey the struggle to see the light of truth and justice that shines at the end of a tunnel of ferocity and fear. His unstable, poverty-stricken, drunken, and tempestuous life is the stuff of legend-as is his perplexing death in Baltimore.īut as an artist, Edgar Allan Poe found profound glory in the shadows. Born in Boston, 1809, Edgar Poe was orphaned less than three years later, and found only desperate unhappiness with the Allans of Richmond, Virginia. “The Black Cat” is a story that collapses in despair over the primal terror of mindless tragedy-which is precisely what makes it a devilishly good read.Įdgar Allan Poe’s seductively sinister stories are sadly reflective of his own beleaguered life of forty years. “The kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual,” wrote Charles Lamb in Witches, and Other Night-Fears, “that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth-that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy-are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.” Another poet, however, tells that some witches and night-fears are not purely spiritual, but are moving bodily among us-disguised as black cats.Įdgar Allan Poe was a man who drank deeply from the cup of fear, and of his many macabre masterpieces, one that stands alone in violent perversity and vivid inexplicability is “ The Black Cat.” Though the tale claws at the threshold of a terrible spiritual design, it is remarkable for keeping the fantastic and the phantasmagoric inscrutable, leaving only the insanity of physical impossibility, robbed of rhyme and reason.

The celebration of fear is a strange and ancient one, which is the source of its strange and ancient power. Fall inspires fallen men with a fascination in tales of terror and supernatural horror, tales that dwell on dark mysteries that transcend the regular course of nature. “The Black Cat” is a story that collapses in despair over the primal terror of mindless tragedy-which is precisely what makes it a devilishly good read…Įven as nature falls asleep under the fiery spell of autumn, there awakens in the lords of nature a keen spiritual sensitivity that can be a type of perversity.

Poe the cat