A selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s most celebrated stories, as heard on BBC Radio.

The master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe has inspired generations of horror writers with his chilling Gothic tales and is also credited with inventing the detective fiction genre in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’.

This collection features five of his classic tales – ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Oblong Box’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, read by David Horovitch, Brian Gear, James Aubrey, Sean Barrett and Don Gilet.

Also here are five of his lesser-known tales – ‘Morella’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘Metzengerstein, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, all read by Owen Teale. Poe’s renowned poem ‘The Raven’ is included, read by Patrick Romer.

Finally, there are adaptations of Poe’s suspenseful story of piracy and slavery, ‘The Gold Bug’, starring Clarke Peters and Rhashan Stone, and his pioneering mystery story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, starring James Fleet and Andrew Scott.

Content warning: ‘The Gold Bug’ is set in a time when slavery was still prevalent in America and contains racist language more appropriate to that era.