Berenice

Egaeus lives a cloistered life in the gloomy hall of his ancestors, given to a strange affliction: a monomania that fixes his attention obsessively on trivial objects for hours on end. His cousin Berenice, once vivid and full of life, is to become his bride — but she is wasting away under a mysterious disease that leaves her rigid and trance-like.

As Berenice declines, Egaeus's obsessive gaze settles on one detail with mounting, uncontrollable intensity: her teeth. When she is pronounced dead and laid in the family vault, his fixation drives him toward an act of horror he can barely remember committing.

One of Edgar Allan Poe's earliest and most shocking Gothic tales, 'Berenice' (1835) is a disturbing study of obsession, madness, and premature burial. Even at the time it scandalised readers — and it remains among Poe's most unsettling short works.