William Wilson: (Edgar Allan Poe Masterpiece Collection)
Narrated by Cathy Dobson
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Poe writes a man haunted by his own name — Cathy Dobson delivers the unraveling with eerie precision.
- Great if you want: gothic psychological horror with unreliable narrators
- Listening experience: short and tightly wound — dread builds sentence by sentence
- Narration: Dobson's measured tone amplifies the story's creeping dread
- Skip if: dense 19th-century prose slows your engagement
Listen to William Wilson: (Edgar Allan Poe Masterpiece Collection) on Audible →
About This Audiobook
A man who calls himself William Wilson is haunted from boyhood by a double who shares his name, his face, and an irritating habit of appearing at exactly the moment when Wilson's worst impulses are about to triumph. Whether the double is supernatural, psychological, or moral is left for the reader to determine; what is clear is that Wilson's attempts to escape his double through increasingly extreme self-indulgence only make the confrontations more inevitable. Poe's 1839 story is one of the earliest and most psychologically sophisticated treatments of the doppelganger theme.
Cathy Dobson brings the brooding, confessional quality that Poe's first-person narrators require, giving Wilson's voice the self-dramatizing despair of a man who can see exactly what he is becoming and cannot stop. The story's ambiguity, particularly its final scene, is preserved in Dobson's delivery, which lets the listener draw their own conclusions. This is a compact but rewarding listen for fans of Poe's psychological horror.
