Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe

This one was really hard to read!

One of the joys of this new series is that I get to learn how different writing styles sound when they are read aloud. Reading aloud has always been part of the English prose tradition, and while some authors seem to be writing with this in mind some, like Poe, make life as difficult as possible for the speaker! Those long and particular sentences full of obscure words, that unhinged tremor in the narrator’s voice, the French and Latin that leaps out at you from nowhere — it all leaves the tongue thoroughly twisted.

Those of you who are writers will, I hope, find it interesting to hear how someone who isn’t a trained actor (me!) handles reading prose aloud. Perhaps it will shape your own choices.

So without further ado…

Grab yourself a beverage of your choice and join me in my kitchen to hear a story from ‘The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts & Mysteries,’ (1936): “an impressively handsome book with a huge range of classic and more obscure stories of the supernatural from every famous writer of that particular genre that you could imagine, from Stoker to Christie, from M. R. James to H. G. Wells.”

I’m affectionately calling it ‘The Bat Book’ because of its lovely front cover design. We found my copy in amongst my grandmother’s books and it struck me as an excellent opportunity to read and discuss some short horror stories with fellow lovers of the spooky and macabre. I will be reading them out loud for the first time as I record, and you’ll hear all the mistakes I make along with the humming of my fridge, the buzzing of lights, and the occasional commotion in the gardens outside.

Today’s story is “Berenice” by Edgar Allan Poe, which is described in the contents as follows:

“He brooded for hours over what most people would have passed over at a glance. Small things became overwhelmingly significant, passages in books, peculiarities of people — disinterment of corpses, a set of magnificent teeth.”

Listen to the full story and subscribe to join in today’s chat thread to hear what I thought of it, and share your reactions too. Buy me a coffee here or become a paid subscriber to keep me writing and get access to my full archive and exclusive articles.