Berenice
I honestly feel that Edgar Allan Poe was one of, if not the first, to write short horror stories like this one. In many of his stories I see a pattern of disease. Such as this one, where Berenice is slowly rotting away from a disease and all that remains are her teeth. Creepy. Also, mental diseases come into play, like the narrator Egaeus suffering from monomania; which is when you obsess over one thing at a time. Berenice and Egaeus were set to be married even though she had a degenerative disease. The monomania comes into play when he sees her smile and sees her teeth for the very first time. He doesn't become obsessed with her beautiful smile, but her teeth. The teeth you go to the dentist for. One thing sets another thing off and Egaeus finds out Berenice has to be buried in which she does. Then one day Egaeus' maid wake him up and tell him that Berenice's burial spot has been disturbed. Someone dug up Berenice, but who? Yup, you guessed it; Egaeus violated her resting place. The only weird thing is, was that he didn't realize he did it until he saw a shovel in his room and mud and blood on his clothes. Then he peers into a box that is in his room and sees "thirty two small, white and ivory looking substances" (Berenice's teeth.) He was so obsessed over them that he went and removed them from her corpse in the graveyard. If that isn't obsessive I don't know what is. I would probably ask Egaeus how he blanked out through the entire teeth removing process. And he would probably say "My monomania does that to me; I blank out when I'm doing the deed."
The Furnished Room
I feel like I was sort of, in a way, reading Romeo and Juliet. A young man commits suicide when he finds out the young woman he was searching for tirelessly, kills herself. But I would say it was a darker version of Romeo and Juliet. The room in which this all takes place, I feel, has a lot of history. It is a dark, musty room with stories in every wall about other people who have been there. I feel like their lives or the lives of the others in the room where rather bleak. Before the young man commits suicide, he goes into the room and looks for a belonging of his love interest but all he finds is something intangible; a sweet smell. Maybe the sweet smell was her, maybe is wasn't I'm still a bit fuzzy but he commits suicide after he smells the smell. Only later do we find out that smell was just gas. I feel like it was her from beyond tricking him into committing suicide so they both can be together but who really knows. This story reflects a city because a city has drama on every other corner. A city has stories to tell and I think that applies in this situation.
The Boarded Window
This story was a little crazy but in a good way. Here we have a young narrator talking about a story his grandfather told him. It was about an old man who once was, full of life. But in the story he was described as stoic. The story has the usual "love of his life having a disease" and one day she was presumed dead; only by him of course. He binds her hands with a ribbon and is preparing her for burial as he lies her down onto a table. He falls asleep next to his "dead" wife. In the middle of the night he hears a series of noises but he is so scared that all he does is look up. He quickly grabs his rifle and fires aimlessly and the flash of the rifle is the only way he is able to see bits of what is going on. He lived in the west frontier but he was able to see (with the flashes of his rifle) a panther attacking his "dead" wife. The panther scampers off because the rifle scared him, but then he looks closely at his wife and her hands aren't bound with the ribbon anymore. Her hands were clenched almost as is she was fighting the panther back. He then looks at his wife's face and sees that the panthers ear was in her mouth. Leading the reader (or me anyways) to believe that she was alive and well but the maul of the panther actually killed her and not her disease. He was planning her burial a little too soon. I think it did involve supernatural powers because he saw that his wife was dead right? And it was toward the end where he woke back up and fought off the panther so I do think the supernatural was involved to some extent.
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