Open Culture: “Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier variety of scarier stories — to choose from than ever before. But whatever their relevance to the specific lives we may live and the specific dreads we may feel today, how many such current works stand a chance of being read a couple of centuries from now, with not just historical interest but genuine chills? With each Halloween that brings us nearer to the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary debut, the works of that American pioneer of the grotesque and the macabre grow only more deeply troubling. “The word that recurs most crucially in Poe’s fictions is horror,” writes Marilynne Robinson in the New York Review of Books. “His stories are often shaped to bring the narrator and the reader to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the experience it evokes are explored or by implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that is not characteristic of major literature in general. Clearly Poe was fascinated by popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial” — obsessions that haven’t lost much popularity since his day. Examined more closely, “the horror that fascinated him and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is often the inescapable confrontation of the self by a perfect justice, the exposure of a guilty act in a form that makes its revelation a recoil of the mind against itself.” This is true, Robinson writes, of such still-widely-read works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”…”