The Black Cat (1840) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's prose is pretty wordy by today's standards, but he avoids the same pitfalls Lovecraft dives headfirst into because he's very to-the-point with the actual content of his stories. Poe's lilting style suggests that his perpetually unreliable narrators are not quite in their rightest mind, and it's subtly offputting for that. He's nowhere near as subtle as a Shirley Jackson, but her work frequently reminds me of his—neither are blatant enough leave you bored by another maniacally insane narrator.

The more demonstrably insane a character is, the more boring, one-dimensional, and unrelatable they seem to become. And so depictions of insanity are always way more interesting and when they sprout from a kernel of logic that grows into such otherwise unstable action. It's why we love characters like the Joker, Tyler Durden, or Hannibal Lecter. We've all been in moods that'd see us burn a pile of money, or blow up a credit card company, or eat someone's liver with some nice fava beans and Chianti.

Okay, so maybe not the last one. But you get my point. Dostoyevsky's fond of prattling on about the inherent irrationality of humanity and how it torpedoes our repeated (and inevitably failed) attempts at crafting a Utopian society, and Poe totally gets that. Except rather than axing a landlady in the noggin, he chooses to axe his wife in the noggin. And drink tons of booze and write poetry, too (which sounds like a fuckin' party to me, let's go).

This reminds me a lot of The Tell-Tale Heart —so much so that they could be companion pieces. It's a fantastically morbid work of art that had to be a stunningly realized piece of short fiction when it was produced in Poe's contemporary era. And it leaves me wondering: "How the hell did this guy have any friends?" I mean, if one of my buds wrote something like this, I'd probably be making a concerted effort to avoid them. Or at least to make sure they spent as little time as possible in the same room as my pets.

Poe's brilliant, and I find it interesting that the man himself has been so overridden by the pop culture
persona his work has mutated him into—like a real-life version of Frankenstein's monster. I mean, I own a pair of socks with Edgar Allan Poe's face all over them. And really, can you imagine what he'd have thought about a freaking NFL mascot being named after one of his works? It's completely bizarre, but I find it hard to argue that his work and his persona aren't each so interesting and worthwhile that they're not deserving of the utmost honor that is being completely perverted by modern American corporate interests in order to make a quick buck.

So here's to Poe, whose face adorns my socks and whose stories haunt my mind.

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