TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION - Dent

Looked doors, sealed cavities, bricked-up alcoves and premature burial close in on Poe's narrator as they, like their victims, are cut off from light, air and human society. Partly, Poe's stories resonate as the 'disordered chambers' of the narrators' minds, but also they suggest archetypal, if extreme, psychological states. Yet Poe was an incurable hoaxer, and in telling some wonderful short stories he also told some excessively tall tales.