Edgar Allan Poe was the creator, in prose and poetry, of an eerie, highly wrought chamber music, different in both sound and sense from the compositions of hisEdgar Allan Poe was the creator, in prose and poetry, of an eerie, highly wrought chamber music, different in both sound and sense from the compositions of his nineteenth- century literary contemporaries. Poe’s writings orchestrate effects with such cunning that they hold readers in a singularly sensational spell: We remember what Poe’s work feels like, just as we might remember the substance of other writers. There is nothing else quite like it.

Take “The Tell-Tale Heart,” one of his most haunting tales. It opens with the narrator’s invocation of his own sensitivity: “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.” As the story unfolds, his acute susceptibility is transferred to the reader through a heightened pitch of language and a preternatural attention to sensory details; it’s like a campfire ghost story caught in the telling, moonlight and leaf-rustling wind included. Seldom has creepiness been given such palpable aesthetic shape.

Poe’s most famous stories—“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado”—exhibit a similar single-minded fascination of effect, and it is upon these tales that the author’s enduring appeal is built. (His poems take his method to extremes, their ominous sonorities accumulating until they seem to be sounding lullabies for wicked children, with the consequence that they can be impossible to forget, as in the cases of “The Raven” and “The Bells.”) Embracing popular forms of melodrama—Poe would become the patron saint of horror movies—his compact narratives employ an over-the-top evocation of terror to expose deep-seated yet familiar fears of guilt and exposure, as if the author were, a half century early, reinventing the fairy tale for the Freudian era: “If you only knew,” he seems to say, “the dark secrets our telltale hearts contain.”

Nonetheless, to focus only on his mastery of the macabre, or on his notorious biographical legend of alcoholism and degradation, is to sell Poe short. His only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, is a visionary exploration of the themes the tales of horror distill, and his last work, Eureka: A Prose Poem, presages some of the findings of twentieth-century quantum physics. Perhaps most tellingly for readers of future generations, Poe more or less invented the detective story in three tales of ratiocination featuring the brilliant and eccentric C. Auguste Dupin: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter.” No less a luminary than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would credit Poe’s peculiar genius with imparting “the breath of life” to the form that Conan Doyle’s own