The Tell-Tale Heart - Il cuore rivelatore / The Premature Burial - La sepoltura prematura
Gilded Nightmares – Timeless British Library Books
by Edgar Allan Poe, Elisabetta Querci
Narrated by William Roberts
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Two stories about being buried alive — one by a madman who isn't, one by a man who insists he isn't mad — and Poe makes both equally terrifying.
- Great if you want: classic Gothic horror in a short, punchy format
- Listening experience: intense and claustrophobic — each tale lands under an hour
- Narration: Roberts suits Poe's formal, mounting-dread prose style
- Skip if: you need English-only — this edition is bilingual Italian/English
About This Audiobook
Two of Edgar Allan Poe's most compact and disturbing short stories, appearing here in a bilingual Italian and English edition. The Tell-Tale Heart follows a narrator insisting on his own sanity while confessing to murder and then dismemberment, his obsession with a dead man's eye building to a guilt-driven self-betrayal. The Premature Burial explores the terror of being interred alive, moving from historical cases toward a confessional narrative that Poe frames as his own. Both stories demonstrate Poe's mastery of unreliable narration and the psychology of dread.
William Roberts narrates the English text with the controlled intensity that these stories demand, walking the line between the narrator's claimed rationality and the obvious irrationality of the actions being described. The short format makes both stories ideal for audio, where the cumulative pressure of Poe's syntax lands without interruption.
