My book was 18 Best Stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Since it was a compilation of many different, short stories, I can't really summarize the book itself. Throughout the book though, the themes are pretty consistent. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a lot of scary, dark stories and some that were just interesting. This book was mostly the scary ones, with a few that were extremely confusing and just meant to make the reader think.
My favorite of the scary stories was "The Black Cat." It follows the life of a man who loved animals his whole life, and they loved him back. But as he gets older, he slowly gets disgusted with them. He gets a black cat that follows him around all day and is very friendly toward him, and it makes him hate the cat more and more every day. He ends up killing it, but then soon after another very similar cat finds him. This one lives with him for a while and he hates it just the same. When he tries to kill it, his wife gets in the way and he ends up killing her. It is a very dark, depressing story, but also extremely interesting and fun to read.
There aren't a lot of the not so dark stories in this book. But one very short story, "The Sphinx" confused me greatly, but was very interesting. It follows a man who goes into the woods with his friend on a camping trip. And in the nearby town, people are dying quickly of mysterious causes. Then, one day the man sees an enormous creature going down the face of a hill in the distance. He explains what he saw to his companion who finds an accurate description of what he saw in a book. It turns out that the creature was a sphinx. But when his companion looks, he realizes that it was only an optical illusion and something completely different.
In my opinion, this was a great book choice, I would highly reccomend it to anyone looking for an interesting read and doesn't mind a few dark, scary stories. Every story in the book kept me well amused throughout my reading of it, and while some are a bit gruesome, they are still enjoyable to read and should be for most people. The language is a bit sophisticated and hard to understand at times, so that would be the worst part of the book in my opinion. Otherwise, it was excellent.
