Tales,by Edgar Allan Poe, is a collection of 25 stories from the literary father of the mysterious and the macabre. These individual pieces, which includeThe Fall of the House of Usher,andSilence: A Fable,together make up the body of bothTales of the Grotesque and ArabesqueandTales of the Folio Club.Taken as a whole, Poe's writing has cast its dark and exquisite shadow over many genres of literature, from the mysteries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the science fiction of Jules Verne, but in this collection the author's ability to explore the darker corners of the readers' psyche comes to the fore. Such is the power of his storytelling that his tales retain their eerie power to delight and terrify in equal measure more than a century and a half after his death.