Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Raven Edition, Volume 1

This is where American literature learned to be afraid of the dark. The first volume of the Raven Edition gathers Poe's most devastating short fiction: tales of entombment, obsession, and the thin membrane between the rational and the rotten. Here you'll find the inventor lost at sea, the narrator who cannot escape his own reflection, the beating heart beneath the floorboards. Poe doesn't merely frighten he dissects fear itself, laying it open on the operating table with surgical precision and a poet's ear for the grotesque. Also included are contemporaneous reflections on his work, offering a window into how his contemporaries understood (or failed to understand) a writer so far ahead of his time. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where modern horror, psychological thriller, and the dark imagination all begin.