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Edgar Alan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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The short story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Alan Poe is not a new story to me. In middle school we watched an illustrated reading of the short story and I feel in love. I like it because it has beautiful details, interesting character, and in a short amount of words it instilled panic. While it isn’t a horror story with a mass serial killer and tons of gore, it is wonderfully unsettling. I really hate overly gore filled stories. I like ones that have a musty atmosphere like this one. Cozy and unnerving.
I highly regard any short story that can make me feel in the moment without chewing my ear off. Detail that increases in intensity for important things but lacking in others. For instance the setting of the house was barely spoke of, but the man’s old vulture eye was. All the darkness, pitch black and thick, was practically oozing off the page. The auditory descriptions were also present that made each noise specific. There was no such thing as a single groan, it had to be a “low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe”. The kind of detail that you can almost hear as if you’ve heard such a thing before. Sounds like the slow increasing ringing of a heart beating beneath the floor boards. …show more content…

It suggests early in the story that at some point this man was fine, or at least a little less “mad”. It suggests that he has some sort of disease or developed one. I also really like how he wasn’t just some crazy guy off killing old men. Thank goodness right? No, the main character had a fixation on the man’s eye. The rest of the old man he loved! He listed off how kind he was, how he wasn’t interested in the man’s money, that he was only burdened by that one ‘Evil Eye.” So much so that he could not bring himself to kill the man unless the eye was open so he could see it! The rest of the man he didn’t mind at all. Poor old

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