The titular character of “Ligeia” is described so thoroughly, you could imagine the author spend days upon days doing nothing but drawing her face in the dark. “The Masque of the Red Death” could be its own lineup of paint colors for Benjamin Moore, it’s so dedicated to the design of each and every room. The funny thing about reading Poe as an adult, though, is you realize that despite being left with extremely strong impressions of the plot you read as a child, the vast proportion of many of the stories is actually dedicated to setting and description. He was chilling, haunting, clever, and one of the scariest things of all was that his characters often didn’t have a well-articulated motivation they were just determined.
He placed you in an atmosphere, chilled you to the bone, and left you to fill in as many blanks as you wished. One of the strongest memories I have of reading in junior high is “The Cask of Amontillado,” because by the time you finish that story, it’s almost impossible to breathe without feeling raspy and smelling mold. And I get to focus on so much else while I read-the language, the setting, the character development-that I have no doubt would be lost on me the second I saw blood and guts on the screen.Įdgar Allan Poe was, for me, the perfect master at this. I don’t worry about them imprinting on the insides of my eyelids. The imagery is there, sure, especially in a well-crafted title, but my brain doesn’t carry it in the same way. This is just one of many reasons I’m so grateful to books. I want to open myself up to that entire creative world. I want the blood and the guts and the sheer terror of it all. So just skip them! But the thing is, I love that stuff, in theory. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, I know. No matter what kind of horror we’re talking about, it’s a no go. It’s one of my biggest fears, that I’ll internalize the images on the screen and turn them into nightmares, making me vulnerable while I’m asleep and can’t control or understand what I see.
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