Edgar Allan Poe and Horror Fiction Essay Example

Are Edgar Allan Poe’s writings of horror fiction? Horror fiction is a prominent genre in the literature world. Though there are very few authors that can chill and even scare people with their writing, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the first people to come to mind when thinking about eerie literature. His works are still recognized as some of the most famous to this day, and he was thought to be the creator of detective and horror stories alike. However, do his writings count as horror fiction? There are many factors and characteristics that go with considering if a piece of literature is horror fiction or not. Some of these include the following: Writers (In this case Poe) explore the conflict in the human soul; characters that face mysterious forces both within and outside themselves; and writers fully understand the frightening power of the unknown and the supernatural. By using the horror fiction characteristics, readers can surely tell that some of his following works do in fact count as horror fiction.

To begin, the poem “The Raven” shows that the writer fully understands the frightening power of the unknown and the supernatural. In this narrative, the main character is mourning the loss of his beloved named Lenore when a few peculiar events occur such as a raven flying onto his statue of Pallas Athena and squawks “nevermore” whenever it is asked a question, which eventually leads him to drive it away when his questions are not given a desirable answer. In this story, the raven is a supernatural force that terrifies the narrator. Poe states, “‘Be that word our sign of parting, bird of fiend!’ I shrieked upstarting- ‘Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!” (Poe 97-99). Due to the raven’s ominous, unchanging answer to his questions and the fact that the raven appeared during the witching hour, the main character deduces that it was simply a creature that came from the underworld to torment him.

Next, the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” involves characters that face mysterious forces both within and outside themselves through their actions and experiences. In the story, the main character and narrator of this story is living with an old man who has a cataract, which haunts the narrator and eventually leads him to kill the old man. This irrationality is a mysterious force because even though he had many other options besides this, he still chose to kill him. Furthermore, the narrator explained that he loved the man, but when he dismembered him and shrieked that the victim’s hideous heart was still beating and alive during the investigation, it is very apparent that he is not in the right state of mind. This is another mysterious force within him because it allowed him to so meticulously plan out his execution and hide the crime. This writing proves that Poe’s writing fits this characteristic of horror fiction.