The Black Cat and Other Stories

" I am not more certain that I breathe than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us, to its prosecution. " Edgar Allan Poe's obsession with the perverse is seen at its most appalling in these tales, in which killers are betrayed by wail of a cat or the beat of a heart - or perhaps by their own perverseness. And Poe's love of extremis takes us to premature burials, into the maelström, and to the bedside of a man mesmerized in the final moments of life - who lives on to declare " I am dead ". This selection includes six of Edgar Allan Poe's classic tales of horror together with his three masterly stories of the unknown at sea : " MS. Found in a Bottle ", " A Descent into the Maelström ", and his only novel, " The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ".