Basil Rathbone Reads Edgar Allan Poe
Subtitle: The Cask of Amontillado / The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar / The Pit and the Pendulum
Publisher: Caedmon
Published: 1960
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: LP
Copyright date: 1960
Description: TALES OF THE MACABRE were particularly absorbing to Poe, and of all he wrote none exceed these three in sheer horror. Their staying power—for no one who has ever read or heard them can erase them from memory —is a tribute to the author's choice of novel and ingenious mental tortures. Even after the passage of one hundred years of brutal wars, crimes and disasters, these horrors still have their intense effect upon the nerves.

A master of his art, Poe produced his result by piling up details so vivid that the logic of the narration completely suspends disbelief. The cumulative power of these details, built up as systematically and metic- ulously as the wall in The Cask of Amontillado, implacably leads to a denouement no less convincing for being fantastic. The listener is gripped as though in the toils of that universal nightmare in which all the surroundings are familiar, save for an unknown horror.
Table of contents: title: Cask of amontillado.; title: Facts in the case of M. Valdemar.; title: Pit and the pendulum.