Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
by Edgar Allan Poe · 1838
What is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket about?
Poe's only completed novel sends young stowaway Pym through mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism-by-lottery and increasingly unearthly southern latitudes, until the story breaks off before a vast white figure at the polar abyss. Part maritime adventure, part hoax (it was presented as a true account), part fever dream, it grows stranger as it goes, abandoning realism for something no one has ever quite categorised. The unresolved ending has tormented and inspired readers for nearly two centuries.
Why it matters
A foundation stone of the weird tale. Jules Verne wrote a sequel (An Antarctic Mystery) and Lovecraft answered it directly with At the Mountains of Madness.
Read next
At the Mountains of Madness
The peak of Lovecraft's 'materialist' horror, hugely influential on SF-horror hybrids from The Thing (Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' is its sibling) to Alien and Prometheus.
The Book of Wonder
A masterclass in the short fantasy tale whose influence runs through Jack Vance, Le Guin and Gaiman; 'the edge of the world' became a permanent fantasy location here.