Poe does the macabre with such mastery and finesse, and The Tell Tale Heart is one of his best efforts. In a very few pages, Poe takes us into the mind of a madman, through the act of murder, and into the horror of the beating heart of a dead man. I was very pleased with revisiting this tale. I will now revisit the rest of Poe's works. ( )

I’ve been trying to read short stories lately and I am so lucky that this is the first one I tried. It definitely is a gem. The narration is incredibly good. The patterns of events leading to the climax until the end is absolutely perfect. ( )

A master of the Gothic short story, this tale of delusion and madness makes for great reading. Often used in conjunction with other tales for exploring themes of loneliness, psychological understanding, dark and gloomy settings, memory, loss, suffering, and death.

Many of Poe's stories have a connection to his own life and paint the picture of the writer as a sad and lonely man lost amidst ghosts of his past.

The Tell-Tale Heart focuses on a young man who is a caretaker of an older gentleman. The older gentleman has two different eyes (perhaps from age or disease) one of which is described as "vulture-like" by the narrator. The young man grows obsessed with this eye and cannot stand it. He commits an act against the old man and spends much of the tale protesting to authorities about how sane he is while describing the cold, calculated, and methodical things he did. In the end, the young man is more driven mad by his own psychosis than anything else.

Recommended for readers as young as middle-grades (6-8).

**All thoughts and opinions are my own.** ( )

I should not have read this before bed. I knew I shouldn't, and yet I did it anyway.

It wasn't scary per se, but it left a lingering creepy sensation hiding in the dark recesses of my mind.

Definitely worth a read! ( )

I should not have read this before bed. I knew I shouldn't, and yet I did it anyway.

It wasn't scary per se, but it left a lingering creepy sensation hiding in the dark recesses of my mind.

Definitely worth a read! ( )