What is your favorite Edgar Allen Poe short story or poem?
That’s a hard one. I think I’d choose “The Pit and the Pendulum” because it’s a classic example of true horror being something that shows you where your mind can go when it has no input. Stephen King said, in his book Danse Macabre, that there are three ways to do a horror story – first, you mess with their mind. Second, you startle them, and if all that fails, then just gross them out. Poe understood this long before King put it in his book, and I think that is why his stories endure as mind-blowing classics even to this day. He was able to convey the true terror of the thing that scares us most – what our minds might do when their only input is what they create themselves.
