Silence: A Fable

Silence A Fable by Edgar Allan Poe Audiobook Demon recounts the story of how he tormented a man in the Congo. The man was seated on a rock on the edge of a churning river. The river was bordered by water lillies and surrounded by a forest of poisonous flowers. The man trembled in fear but did not run from the world he saw. Demon then cast a spell that turned the world into a violent one.

The winds raged. The Earth shook, but the man remained still trembling. The Demon then cast a spell of silence. The Earth ceased to move. The wind stopped as did the water. There was complete silence. The man stood and strained to hear something. The man was then overcome with terror and “fled afar off, in haste.”

Edgar Allan Poe

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews.

He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.