The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 - Edgar Allan Poe

The second volume of Edgar Allan Poe's collected works gathers some of his most celebrated stories, including The Purloined Letter, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Premature Burial. Together they represent the full range of Poe's literary project: stories of psychological disintegration, locked-room detection, Gothic dread, and the peculiar horror of being buried alive.

Bernard Setaro Clark narrates with a command of Poe's elaborate, formal syntax that keeps even the longest sentences intelligible. His voice carries the appropriate weight of the nineteenth-century prose without becoming a performance piece, and he handles both the ratiocination of the Dupin stories and the Gothic hysteria of the horror pieces with equal skill. At ten hours, this is a substantial collection that rewards both fans and newcomers to Poe's work.