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The Black Cat

 The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe is the very epitome of the slasher horror genre.  The way the narrator speaks makes no sense.  The whole narrative is him explaining why he did his acts of violence.  The cat’s only crime was that it loved the narrator too much and the narrator becoming an abusive person by nature.

It makes no sense.  However, if I read a book or a story and it reminds me of The Black Cat or The Tall Tale Heart, I know at once I’m reading a slasher horror story.  It’s where you have a character who is living in an ordinary world and then something triggers them and they go off and do acts of violence.  The old man’s evil eye is the trigger for The Tall Tale Heart.

In this story, we don’t get to see him interact with anyone except for the cat.  There is no interaction between the narrator and his wife.  So we don’t get see her reaction when he starts to be abusive towards animals.  I think this is a way for the narrator to put a distance between himself and the world.  One way to show that there is something strange going on with the character.


The Black Cat was published in 1843.  The audio program I listened to was narrated by Gil Anders.

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