One of Poe’s most masterful uses of first-person narration in a horror story is his unreliable narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” At the outset of the story, the paranoid narrator hastens to assure the reader that he is of sound mind and body. It also gives readers an intimate view of the character’s psyche and provides an additional layer of realism to Poe’s stories, allowing the readers to feel more connected to-and therefore more afraid for-the characters.

In many of his stories, Poe uses his main character as a first-person narrator to heighten suspense and draw readers into the character’s situation. Gothic tales often involve circumstances of mystery and horror, a general atmosphere of gloom and doom, and elements like dungeons, ghosts, and decaying castles with secret passageways. Initially, Poe wrote burlesques of the Gothic story, but soon began to write seriously in the Gothic vein. Gothic TalesĪlthough Edgar Allan Poe began his literary career as a poet, he quickly recognized the demand for short fiction. His use of psychological horror through first-person narration inspired other writers such as Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Edgar Allan Poe was not the first writer of horror stories, but his literary techniques form the foundation of the immensely popular literary genre as we know it today.

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