The Black Cat and Other Tales

Flash forward a few centuries, one finds not just a doubt, but a powerful statement of the reality of perverse inclinations in human nature: in Poe’s tales, such as The Black Cat or The Imp of the Perverse, one finds characters doing the most horrible things out of a self-confessed desire to do evil, with no apparent gain, and embracing the moral destruction they bring upon themselves.

Clearly the times were ripe for a radical revision of the guise of the good dogma. It was exciting for me to discover in Poe’s fiction a clear expression of philosophical ideas central… show more.