Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, William S. Burroughs & Others

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.”

You can hear all of those sto­ries and more in the Youtube playlist above, nar­rat­ed by a vari­ety of per­form­ers imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able by voice alone: Christo­pher Lee, Vin­cent Price, William S. Bur­roughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rath­bone, and the late James Earl Jones.

Whether read aloud or on the page, Robin­son notes, Poe “has always been reviled or cel­e­brat­ed for the absence of moral con­tent in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straight­for­ward moral para­bles. For a writer so intrigued by the oper­a­tions of the mind as Poe was, an inter­est in con­science leads to an inter­est in con­ceal­ment and self-decep­tion, things that are secre­tive and high­ly indi­vid­ual and at the same time so uni­ver­sal that they shape civ­i­liza­tions.” While there are civ­i­liza­tions, there will be tell-tale hearts; and while there are tell-tale hearts, there will be an audi­ence respon­sive to Edgar Allan Poe’s brand of hor­ror, on Hal­loween or any oth­er night.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

Watch a Strange Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Vot­ed the 24th Best Car­toon of All Time (1953)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.