Did you "get" Edgar Allan Poe the first time you read him as a kid? In sixth grade I found "The Cask of Amontillado" mystifying but mesmerizing---but went straight on to read "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" in an unforgettable fever. Might Poe (1809-49) be the first author to base a career on Obsession? Monsieur Dupin, fiction's earliest "ratiocinative" detective, is obsessed by reason, Poe's irrational characters wracked by bizarre manias, and "The Imp of the Perverse"---that inner demon which urges you to folly---has passed into the language.

But when did you reread him last? This augmented edition of the core stories provides an excellent incentive. An introduction by novelist Stephen Marlowe previews the many genres included: chronicles of crime, humorous squibs, tales of hoaxes and adventure-exploration---and those fables of terror that inspired writers from Kafka and Lovecraft to King and Oates. Even with all your adult wits about you, the spell still works.

After you re-emerge from Nevermoreland, the brand-new Afterword by independent scholar Regina Marler provides a compelling portrait of the man himself in 1845. About to achieve literary, romantic, and financial prosperity at last, his self-sabotaging personality, spurred on by alcoholism, shot it all to hell. Fresh research illuminates the characteristic themes of his work and the fixations of his penniless life, with fine suggestions for further reading (such as his story "Ligeia," that pioneering account of dental fetishism). With guides like these, isn't it time you took another "Descent into the Maelstrom"?