The Room in the Tower

Poe opens with documented cases of people buried alive before plunging into the first-person account of a man tormented by the same fear. A study of catalepsy, dread, and the line between essay and horror fiction.

Edgar Allan Poe

A narrator answers a desperate letter from his childhood friend Roderick Usher and arrives at a mansion that seems to share its owner's failing mind. Poe's central gothic tale, with a sister buried alive, a house that splits down its middle, and an ending no reader forgets.

Edgar Allan Poe

A wounded traveler takes shelter in an abandoned chateau and discovers a portrait whose lifelike quality hides a terrible bargain. Poe's shortest piece on art that drains the life from its subject, told in barely four pages.

Edgar Allan Poe

Egaeus, a scholar locked in obsession, fixates on the teeth of his cousin Berenice as her body wastes away. Poe at his most disturbing, with a finale so transgressive that the original 1835 magazine printing toned it down.

Edgar Allan Poe

Two medical students supply their anatomy professor with corpses bought in the dead of night, until the trade pulls them into a crime they cannot undo. Stevenson draws on the real Burke and Hare scandal to build a Scottish gothic of guilt, complicity, and one impossible journey home.

Robert Louis Stevenson