Tale Blazers: American Literature
7 total works
Outside the abbey's armoured walls, the common poor are ravaged by a grisly pestilence known as the 'Red Death', while within, safe and untroubled, the happy Prince Prospero hosts lavish entertainments. But, in their immodest comfort, the Prince and his guests are not as safe as they hope from the horrors of the outside world ...
In 'The Masque of the Red Death' and other tales of gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors - of torments of ingenious, malevolent tormentors and of a mind's own sickening madness.
Collected in these two volumes are Poe's legendary tales of terror that attest to his stylistic brilliance in evoking an atmosphere of gloom and obsession. Creatures, eyes, coffins, walls--all are symbols in Poe's efforts to create an aura of evil. What reader would not share the anxiety of the traveler in The Fall of the House of Usher, who upon his first glimpse of the house, finds an -insufferable gloom pervading my spirit...an utter depression of the soul...an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart-? In volume 2 his nightmarish visions take us down untraveled paths revealing the dark side of the human experience.
Real Reads are accessible texts designed to support the literacy development of primary and lower secondary age children while introducing them to the riches of our international literary heritage. Each book is a retelling of a work of great literature from one of the world's greatest cultures, fitted into a 64-page book, making classic stories, dramas and histories available to intelligent young readers as a bridge to the full texts, to language students wanting access to other cultures, and to adult readers who are unlikely ever to read the original versions.
