Ten Great Mysteries

Book 21 of my 2020 Reading Challenge

read from March 23 - 27

Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allen Poe

Summary (via the book jacket)

published 1993 (this book with introductions; the stories themselves are older)

The Pit and the Pendulum...The Purloined Letter...The Tell-Tale Heart...A Descent into the Maelstrom...and six other choice chillers by the acknowledged master of mystery, fantasy, and horror.

These ten absorbing stories, selected by a famed anthologist of science-fiction and the supernatural, prove that even after a century Poe's imagination still works its macabre magic.

My Opinion

3 stars

This light paperback has been in the bottom of my purse for a long time as the "emergency book", something that's always there just in case I finish a book while I'm out or leave in a hurry without bringing a book with me (the absolute horror!).  Now that the world has shut down and I won't be leaving the house for awhile, I decided to bring it out of the reserves and actually read it.

If I read short stories by different authors I will usually separate and talk about them individually but when it's multiple stories by the same author I usually don't.  My overall feeling about this book and the selection of stories is that I like Poe's shorter works but the longer the story gets the denser and wordier it gets and the longer it feels.

I only recognized 3 out of the 10 stories.  Of those 3, The Black Cat was my favorite, The Tell-Tale Heart still holds up and The Pit and the Pendulum was hard for me to evaluate as a story because all I could picture as I was reading was the movie version with Vincent Price.  Of the remaining 7, I would say his lesser-known works are lesser-known for a reason but if I had to pick a favorite among them it would be A Descent into the Maelstrom.