The book The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe inspired me to write what I do now. I never knew I would come to love Edgar Allan Poe like I do now. Especially when I read it in eighth grade, and watched the animations, which were frightening. I was an innocent little 13-year-old, until I got my grubby hands on his work. At first I was traumatized by the first story I read and saw the animation of, the Tell-Tale Heart, but then I started reading it again, and soon I found myself obsessed with his work. It was like some stories I wrote, except I had a smaller vocabulary than Poe did. The suspense he made me feel, the horrific endings, it was perfect for me, the one who had lost all her sanity, and looked for others to join. I obtained every book I could find from the library containing his stories for over the span of 3 years, but it was not enough. The library did not have all of them. I needed more. And then I found the book that changed my life: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I couldn’t believe that the book I had been searching for all those years was right in front of me at the bookstore, and it was finally mine when I begged my mother to buy it. One look at the title made her wince at the thought of her little girl reading horrific tales of spiraling depression and insanity. After several moments of dead silence and some begging from me, she bought it.
Once my mother, my brother, and I were home, I kept reading that book through the night, no matter how scary the stories were, how much my mother begged me to read it in the morning, and how many nightmares I knew I would have that night. I especially enjoyed The Cask of Amontillado, where a man takes revenge on another wine-drinker for insulting him by suffocating him in the damp catacombs of his wine cellar. It was rather harsh for a simple insult, but it was fitting. I’m sure being buried with his wine is a fitting revenge for a wine-obsessed person. I do not know why, but that book inspired me. The tingling in my skull, the shaking of my hands, it made me laugh how well the books’ stories were written and how they affected me. Whenever I read the stories, I felt that I was actually there. The torture of not knowing what was going to happen changed me. I started having thoughts. Mostly dark thoughts, though I am able to coat them with the sugar called “humor” to avoid hospitalization. Slowly, I became more and more fascinated with dark things. Devils and demons, magic, dragons, everything that is shrouded in darkness is me. This made me want to write most horrific and fantastical stories. Novels containing an expanded vocabulary and description, each sentence well-written down to the last letter. Stories about mutants, about revenge and humanity. Humanity. What a childish thought, how humanity can be rewarding. We get nothing but sorrow from this ‘humanity’. I should write about that.