The Imp of the Perverse

Poe's narrator begins with a philosophical treatise on human perverseness, the inexplicable drive to do the thing one knows is wrong specifically because one knows it is wrong. The story that follows illustrates the theory with a murderer who has committed the perfect crime and is undone by the same perverse compulsion that drove him to kill in the first place. The piece functions simultaneously as philosophical essay and horror story, each deepening the other.

Larry G. Jones narrates with the appropriate quality of intellectual remove that Poe's framing requires: the narrator is presenting a case study, and the horror arrives through his dispassion rather than despite it. The audiobook's short length suits the piece's concentrated effect, delivering Poe's central insight about human nature in the brief span it needs and no more. Jones captures the narrator's obliviousness to his own psychological exposure with the dry precision the story demands.