DARK ALLEYS OF THE MIND

Edgar Allan Poe’s book “The Black Cat and Other Stories” is composed by The Black Cat, The Oval Portrait, Berenice and The Mask of the Red Death. Four stories full of scares, murder and mystery, and main characters who seem to be losing their mind in different ways. The stories I have decided to compare are the first three with a book named Cujo, another one called The picture of Dorian Grey and a character from the second season of American Horror Story.

The Black Cat is a story about a man who lives with his wife and his animals, they have many different kind of animals, but his favorite is a black cat. He says he loves “the little thing” but as time passed he gets sick, and when he says that, he is talking about alcoholism, which turns him into an evil and hateful person, and because of the illness he hates the cat, he loathes him and one night he hits his cat and rips his eyeball out. After a while the cat recovers and now hates the human for what he did, the man gets paranoid and one day he cannot stand the cat any longer and he hung it up. After that, he went to sleep and a fire began in his house. Only he and his wife survive, but a disturbing thing happens, a wall has stood still and a print of a figure of a hanged cat is there. After a while the man finds a new cat and since he feels guilty of killing the other one, he picks up the new one. Consumed by his insanity and hate towards the cat, the man kills his wife and hides her behind a wall, when the police arrives he gets to discover when they hear a loud meow and the cat is behind the wall with the death woman.

The story I decided to compare this with is the book Cujo by Stephen King. The similarities in here are the hate that grows on the people towards the animals (in Cujo’s case, a woman), even though the process of this is different. The hate and result is basically the same in killing the animal. Both characters feel the animal is “talking” or showing them what they want to do to them and it just brings the big hate they have towards them, making them crazier every time.

The second story to compare is The Oval Portrait. This story is focused on a man who has to break into a house in the middle of the night because he is injured. His servant leaves him in a room full of portraits, but one in specific captures his attention, until it freaks him out. In the book where he found the stories of the portraits was also that one, the woman, she died after her husband got obsessed over painting her that the portrait “took” her life away.

This story is terrifyingly similar to The Picture of Dorian Gray in terms of the power of the people making the portraits at the point of putting the painted people’s souls in it.

The last one is Berenice, this one is about a lonely man who is almost a hermit, with a cousin called Berenice, she used to be beautiful but since she got sick she lost all her grace and he does not like her anymore. One day he sees her teeth and is mad about them and they are on his mind all the time, until one day, probably fever induced he kills her and takes every single tooth out of her mouth.

For this one it was a little more difficult to find a comparison but in the North American show American Horror Story, in its second season the villain called Oliver Thredson or “bloody face” killed people and what he did with the bodies was ripping their skin and teeth to make a mask. He also got obsessed with these two aspects and until he did not take them from the people he did not feel satisfied.

I must admit that the stories I liked the most were the black cat and Berenice, because they have a spooky feeling, and their endings leave you wanting to know what could have happened later on. It is also interesting to see that in all the stories Poe tends to show a lonely person, maybe isolated slowly descend into madness, with the only difference in the where and how, it is quite particular.