The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

After my American Lit class in high school, I mainly thought of Poe as an influential horror and mystery writer. (Not to mention the source of those great Corman/Vincent Price movies.) I was happily surprised to discover in this collection Poe's sense of humor.

Here's a few that caught me off guard because their entertaining absurdity:

In “Loss of Breath” the narrator loses his breath and is mistaken for dead, resulting in many misadventures.

In “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” the narrator's friend, Dammit (Yup, that's his name), keeps using the expression “I bet the devil my head....” Dammit bets he can jump a bridge. The devil shows up and you can imagine where this goes...

In “Angel of the Odd” the titular angel torments a man with improbable accidents.

In “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” the narrator visits a mental institution to visit and finds that the lunatics literally took over the asylum.

“X-ing a Paragrab” is a tale of two newspapermen having a “war” in print with lots of wordplay using x's and o's.

I loved the stories I knew, like “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” etc. But it was nice to be surprised by some of the odd stories that I didn't know before reading this collection.