Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original subtitle was: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) as it is such an affront to decency, but you will certainly never forget it.Taking you from a Japanese tea ceremony to the mean streets of New York, from ancient battlefields to haunted graveyards and all the way into outer space, Penguin Archive brings together an eclectic range of some of the greatest, most transporting stories, ideas and poetry from ninety years of publishing.