Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough
(Blog:awalkingdelight)
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
The Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection
By: Edgar Allan Poe
Narrated by: Vincent Price & 1 more
Edgar Allan Poe (American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic.)
This photograph of Poe reminds one of characters in his macabre tales. This audio collection of the most famous Edgar Allen Poe’ short stories shows how creative, poetic, and disturbing his imagination is to an unwary listener. Short stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are beautifully poetic but terrifying tales of life and death. Two of the chosen stories are haunted and terror filled narrations by Vincent Price or Basil Rathbone with voices that resonate with macabre messages about living and dying. From guilt that cannot be escaped to the impossibility of eternal life, Poe writes two stories to explain what it means to be a human being.
The hearts and minds of humanity.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is of a murderer of an old man whose body is hidden under the floorboards of a house where two men live together. The murderer perceives his victim had a “vulture eye” that, when it looked at him, made his “blood run cold”. He murders the old man who has this “…eye” and is confident that when the police arrive, the victim will not be discovered. However, as the police arrive to investigate, the murderer can’t help but hear a beating heart of the dead old man that is hidden below the floorboards. Of course, what he is hearing is his own heart from the guilt he feels for having murdered the old man. He confesses to the police because he cannot escape his own conscience. Or as Poe is famous for having written: “A guilty conscience needs no accuser.”
Russian murder room during Stalin’s rule in a visit to the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. (It is not a dungeon with a pendulum, but it speaks to the truth of man’s inhumanity to man.)
“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a clever story about the inevitability of death. Most human beings do not know why, from what, or when they will die but like the swing of a descending pendulum’s blade, life’s end will come. Poe makes it clear that even though we know death will come, most people have a will to survive.
To some, the fear of death is worse than death itself. For others, because of not knowing where you are in life, what will happen in the future, and what one will die from makes fear an irrational way to live life. Descent of a blade’s pendulum, whether slow or fast, is a brilliant symbol of time as life’s executioner. As a human being, we look at our surroundings whether in a dungeon or not, the luck of an animal gnawing through ropes to help keep us alive reminds one of doctors trying to cure our illnesses or an attorney freeing a man from death row. Whomever ties us down in life are the people and circumstances of the life we live. The walls of the pendulum’s chamber are the boundaries of human existence.
A reader/listener of this audio collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s prose illustrates his imaginative genius.
