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Tales of Mystery
and Imagination
E D G A R ALLAN POE
Level 5
R etold by Roland John
Series Editors: Andy Hopkins and Jocelyn Potter

P earson Education Limited
E dinburgh Gate, Harlow,
Essex C M 2 0 2JE, England
a nd Associated Companies throughout the world.
I SBN 0 582 498058
First published in the Longman Simplified English Series 1964
First published in Longman Fiction 1993
This edition first published 2001
NEW EDITION
C opyright © Penguin Books Ltd 2001

T ypeset by Pantek Arts Ltd, Maidstone, Kent
Set in 11/14pt Bembo
P rinted in Spain by Mateu Cromo, S.A. Pinto (Madrid)

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
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Contents
p age
I ntroduction

v

William Wilson

1

T he Gold-Bug

10

T he Fall of the House of Usher

25

T he Red Death

34

T he

Barrel

of

Amontillado

38

T he Whirlpool

43

T he Pit and the Pendulum

53

T he Stolen Letter

62

Metzengerstein

73

T he Murders in the Rue Morgue

79

Activities100

Introduction
'You have won and I have lost. But, from now on you too are dead ...
You existed in me — and this body is your own. See how completely you
have, through my death, murdered yourself.'
T he short stories of Edgar Allan Poe are often strange, wild and
highly imaginative. Many of them examine in an extremely
detailed way the dark side of human existence. In his time, Poewas a very original writer. His stories communicate a world of
t error that comes straight from the depths of his own troubled
m ind.
'William Wilson' (1839) is set in England, where Poe also went
to school. It is a disturbing story about the struggle between the
g ood and bad sides of a young man's character.
' The Gold-Bug' (1843) is one of Poe's most popular stories,
selling over300,000 copies in its first year. The story shows how
clear thinking can make sense of things we do not at first
u nderstand. In this case, the clear thinking leads to the discovery
of immense treasures.
A nother strange and very frightening story is 'The Fall of the
H ouse of Usher' (1839).The character Roderick Usher has often
b een compared with Poe himself; both lived in continual fear ofdeath and kept apart from human company.
Two more shocking stories in which death claims victory are
' The Red Death' (1842) and 'The Barrel of Amontillado' (1846).
' The Whirlpool' (1841) is an adventure story set on the
N orwegian coast, in which the main character experiences
terrible fear and lives to tell the tale.
' The Pit and the Pendulum' (1843) describes in horrible detail
t hecruelty of human beings to each other, and examines fear and
hopelessness at the point of death.
v

' Metzengerstein' is one of Poe's early tales. Set in Hungary, it is
a story about the power of evil.
' The Stolen Letter' and 'The Murders in the R u e Morgue'
(1841) are mystery stories featuring C.Auguste Dupin, on whom
o ther great fictional characters such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock
H olmeswere later modelled.
T he American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was
b orn in Boston in 1809. He hardly knew his parents, who were
b oth actors; his father left when Edgar was a baby, and his mother
died before he reached the age of three. John Allan and his wife
Frances took the young boy into their home and brought him up
as their own child. Between 1815 and 1820 he lived...