Horror · Mystery
Tales of Mystery and Terror
A beating heart under the floor, a crumbling house and a pit beneath a swinging blade.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Short, dark and exact
This collection gathers some of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known tales from the 1830s and 1840s. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a murderer insists he is perfectly sane. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, a visitor arrives at a decaying mansion where his old friend and his friend’s sister are wasting away. In “The Pit and the Pendulum”, a prisoner of the Inquisition wakes in total darkness. There are also “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Black Cat” and “The Purloined Letter”, in which Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, solves a case more than forty years before Sherlock Holmes appeared.
Why it works for learners
Poe wrote short, and he wrote for effect: every story builds to a single moment of horror or revelation. That makes each tale a complete, satisfying reading session. His narrators are usually obsessive and explain themselves in detail, which gives you plenty of language for feelings, the senses and the mind: fear, sound, darkness, heart, wall, silence, madness. Poe’s own English is ornate and full of rare words, but the stories survive simplification well, because their power lies in the situation. The style is something to grow into.
Which level to start at
B1 is a good start, one tale at a time. B2 lets you feel more of the mounting dread. At C1 and C2 you meet Poe’s rich vocabulary head on. Try the narration: these are stories with a strong rhythm, and they sound as good as they read.
Read next
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, an American ghost story with a sense of humor
- The Turn of the Screw, terror that may all be in the mind
- The Arabian Nights, whose heroine Poe sends on one more, very strange story in this collection