The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Narrated by William Roberts
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Poe wrote this so convincingly that 19th-century readers thought a man had genuinely been hypnotized at the moment of death — and the ending will make you understand why.
- Great if you want: Gothic horror that's cerebral, unsettling, and mercifully short
- Listening experience: clinical dread that builds to one deeply disturbing final image
- Narration: William Roberts suits the cold, documentary prose style well
- Skip if: you want a story, not a single sustained act of horror
About This Audiobook
A dying man is placed under hypnosis by a narrator who wishes to observe the exact moment of death from a consciousness that remains present and communicative even as the body shuts down. What follows disturbs the narrator and his witnesses deeply, because the hypnotic subject does not simply die, and the answer he gives when commanded to speak defies every expectation. Poe published the story in 1845 as apparent fact, and many readers believed it.
William Roberts narrates with the matter-of-fact tone of a nineteenth-century scientific report, which is precisely the register Poe intended and the only one that can make the horror land with full force. The audiobook's short length suits the story's effect perfectly: this is a tale designed to produce a single, escalating shock, and Roberts sustains the documentary flatness until the moment it shatters. Poe's most unsettling tales work especially well in audio, where the voice's proximity to the listener intensifies the intimacy of the dread.
