This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most celebrated writers of horror, mystery, and the macabre.  His stories have always lent themselves to illustration and dramatization, and the newest offering, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Death and Dementia, takes some of Poe’s shorter stories and tales and adds the haunting and powerful graphics of Gris Grimly.  Although the stories themselves are adapted and abridged, the careful editing work and the addition of the drawings ensures that they have lost none of their power to frighten and amaze.

The stories selected are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”, “The Oblong Box”, and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. Each of these stories is creepy and eminently suited for the Fall and Halloween season–although they would be macabre fun at any time of year. “Tell-Tale Heart” is the most famous of the group, and the longest by far, but the abridgement is done with tact and an excellent ear for Poe’s writing style. The illustrations add to the mounting feeling of horror that Poe’s words are creating, darting from images of a staring eye, to a man sitting upright in bed, to the horror of the deed itself, acting as vehicles for the movement of the plot instead of mere mirrors of the words of the story.

The stories that follow are all significantly shorter, but each carries their own version of the malevolent and macabre that Poe was able to invoke with such grace.  The characters that inhabit the stories are imperfect and fallible narrators, often swept up into situations they neither comprehend nor manage, and each of the stories is modified without losing the sense of Poe’s descriptive writing. Often, where large chunks of the story have been modified or removed, the illustrations fill the gap, adding a visual element to an already imagination-rich story.  The illustrations are just real enough to feel true, but they do not lose the sense of the surreal that is present in the stories and will often wind their way around the words themselves.

The selection of the stories is excellent. Although “Tell-Tale” is by far the most famous of the four, the rest of the pieces blend together very well and show the variety that Poe brought to his writing.  We visit an insane asylum, a boat at sea with a mysterious cargo, and an investigation into the effects of mesmerism on death. Because the stories are at a similar level, and have a similar tone, they work together well as a collection and as an excellent introduction to Poe’s work. It is always difficult to abridge and modify an author whose work relies on repetition and description to heighten the anxiety and terror of his reader, but this set of stories has been superbly handled, and the voice and tenor of Poe’s writing still shines through the text.

This collection has been modified with younger readers in mind, but the subject matter and the illustrations make it a fun read for those who are already familiar with Poe’s work or someone of any age who is looking for a deft introduction to this master story-teller. After all, who could avoid a frisson of nerves at these opening lines:

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad?

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