It’s October once more, and as tradition, I pull my prized possession from its sacred spot on my bookshelf. I’ve been spellbound by Poe’s words and haunted by his story ever since I first met him in the dim corners of a high-school classroom. There’s simply nothing more fitting for autumn than sinking into his shadowed tales while the trees blush with color, tea steams beside me, and a warm blanket guards against the chill.
There’s a certain enchantment in reading Edgar Allan Poe by candlelight — the kind of stillness where shadows breathe, and every creak of the floorboard feels like a heartbeat from another realm. His words linger like incense smoke, curling through the corners of your mind long after you’ve closed the book.
Within The Complete Works, the veil between beauty and terror feels paper-thin. Poe’s writing is a gothic waltz — sorrow twined with elegance, madness cloaked in poetry. Each tale is a dimly lit corridor leading deeper into the heart of human emotion: love that decays, dreams that haunt, and darkness that somehow glimmers with truth.
Reading Poe in October feels almost ritualistic — as though the turning leaves and thinning veil conspire to make his stories come alive. His rhythm and melancholy become the pulse of autumn itself, reminding us that even in decay, there is art… and in despair, a strange and delicate grace.
So brew a dark cup of tea, light a candle, and let Poe’s words pull you into the quiet, haunted corners of your own imagination. This isn’t just reading — it’s communion with the gothic soul of the season.
Here are 3 of my top favorite works by Edgar Allan Poe:
The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe’s House of Usher is where sorrow becomes architecture—where walls breathe despair and madness seeps through the floorboards. It’s a story that teaches us: sometimes the things we build from grief will one day collapse beneath its weight.
This story is more than gothic horror—it’s an elegy to the human mind when shadow overcomes reason. Roderick and Madeline Usher are not merely characters; they are reflections of the same fractured soul, two halves of decay and dread intertwined. The house becomes their mirror, and as its foundation crumbles, so too does the delicate boundary between life, death, and the madness that bridges them.
Poe crafts atmosphere like ritual—each line deliberate, rhythmic, and intoxicating. Reading it feels like walking candle-first through a haunted mind.
The Raven
In The Raven, grief grows wings and perches above the heart.
Its cry — Nevermore — is both curse and comfort,
reminding us that love never truly leaves…
it simply learns to haunt more softly.
The Raven feels less like a poem and more like a séance. Each stanza rises and falls like the flutter of wings in a dimly lit room, echoing with longing and unanswered prayers. There’s something achingly human in the narrator’s descent — the way grief turns to obsession, and sorrow begins to whisper back in the dark.
Poe captures loss not as a single moment, but as an endless echo — a voice that refuses to fade. The raven’s refrain, “Nevermore,” becomes a spell of mourning, a reminder that some loves haunt rather than heal. Reading it aloud feels like invoking that sorrow yourself, the rhythm pulsing like candlelight trembling in the wind.
It’s hauntingly beautiful — the kind of poem that sits with you long after, like a ghost that doesn’t wish to be banished.
Annabel Lee
Annabel Lee is a love poem dressed in mourning — delicate, eternal, and softly tragic. It carries the scent of salt and sorrow, the sea itself weeping as the tides retell a story of love too pure for this world. Poe captures the ache of devotion so deep it defies death, where love becomes a spirit lingering between realms.
Each verse feels like a prayer whispered through tears — simple yet spellbound. Beneath the melancholy is an almost childlike faith: that true love can be stolen by angels but never destroyed. Reading Annabel Lee feels like holding a seashell to your ear and hearing the echo of something once beautiful, now gone, but never forgotten.
Few poems embody beauty within loss as elegantly as Annabel Lee. It’s both lullaby and elegy, where love transcends mortality yet is forever marked by it. Poe turns the seaside into sacred ground — a place where memory lives and grief becomes worship.
It’s love as haunting, devotion as afterlife. In the rhythm of the waves, you can almost hear his heart breaking, over and over, whispering her name.
It’s grief, but also reverence — the kind of love story that reminds us why ghosts stay.
Karmic Note:These photos show the complete works that are in this book, and it is just absolutely phenomenal.
