Short storyGothic · 1843Study guide · no full textSteady

The Black Cat

Poe's most uncomfortable story because the cruelty begins casually. The perverseness he describes — doing the thing precisely because it is forbidden — is the engine.

Horror Guilt Madness Addiction

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile action for no other reason than that he knew he should not?”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Guilt — how other works handle it →Madness — how other works handle it →

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

Choose another work→