HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
What are your plans for tonight? Seeing as it's a weekday (ugh), my plans consist of staying indoors with the lights dimmed, candles on and watching scary films with the volume turned up way too high and ruining my teeth with toffee apples. I don't know about you but i'm sad that October is over. I loved walking into shops, pubs, work etc. and seeing spooky decor all around me, it's my kind of vibe. Though I can't complain too much because my bedroom is spooky all year round with the amount of skulls that I have in here!
Anyway, tonight i'm bringing you the last of my Halloween book posts. Enjoy!
THE TELL-TALE HEART
Title: The Tell-Tale Heart
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publication: 1843
Genre: Gothic, Horror
My Rating: ★★★★☆
Favourite Quote: "Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim."
The Tell-Tale Heart is widely considered a classic of Gothic Fiction and one of Poe's most famous short stories. Poe is the master of suspense- chilling suspense. With madness and delusion as it's central theme, The Tell-Tale Heart is an unsettling short story, fabricated to demonstrate the psychology of a person's mind who is slowly eaten up by guilt.
"It's impossible to say how the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night."
The tale follows an unnamed narrator who attempts to convince the reader of his sanity whilst describing a murder he just committed. The narrator feels disturbed by an old man with a "vulture eye" as he calls it. Cold, calculated and well-executed, the narrator dismembers the old man and hides his body beneath the floorboards. What the narrator didn't prepare for though, is the supposed heavy thumping of the old man's heart after his death. It's the narrator's guilt which has manifested itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating beneath the floorboards.
“I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
“He had the eye of a vulture- a pale blue eye, with film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees very gradually I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”
The ambiguity and lack of details about the narrator and the old man stand in stark contrast to the specific plot details leading up to the murder. It's unclear what relationship, if any, the old man and his murderer share. Does the narrator have any reason to fear the old man or his eye? Perhaps the old man is a father figure, or maybe his eye represents some sort of veiled secret. I read somewhere that an eye is a window to one's soul. Perhaps the narrator saw through the old man's true self or there was something in those eyes that reflected in the narrator's own. Who knows? It's eternally unresolved. The story is cleverly constructed so that logic permits many interpretations. Subjective preference allows one strand of logic to dominate, but the existence of the other possibilities is what makes this tale a thrilling and mind-infecting work of literature.
"Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was a grown of mortal terror...the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul."
The reason why I rated this book 4 stars is down to its lack of explanation and reasoning. I'm not about "keeping the ending open/open mind". I love resolutions after the end of a story. I love answers and knowing why something happened. And so, it's just a little too mysterious for me.
This didn't stop me from loving it, though. The Tell-Tale Heart is a quick, chilling and suspenseful classic to read on Halloween. Perhaps you'll hear your own heart thumping as you turn every page because mine certainly did.
No comments:
Post a Comment