The Black Cat

The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's tale begins as a gentle soul devoted to animals, doting above all on a large black cat named Pluto. But as drink takes hold of him, tenderness curdles into cruelty. In a fit of drunken rage he mutilates the cat, and later hangs it — an act of pure 'perverseness' that he cannot fully explain even to himself.

Haunted by what he has done, he takes in a second black cat that seems to bear the mark of the first. His guilt hardens into hatred, and one fateful day in the cellar his violence turns from the animal to his own wife — with consequences he tries, and fails, to bury.

First published in 1843, 'The Black Cat' is one of Poe's darkest studies of guilt, alcoholism, and self-destruction. Narrated on the eve of the narrator's execution, it remains a chilling meditation on the human capacity for cruelty.