Poe's The Black Cat turns a hidden crime into a confession by howl
Edgar Allan Poe's narrator is sure he has committed the perfect crime. Police have searched his cellar and found nothing. Then, boasting about how solid the walls are, he taps the very one he built, and an unearthly cry answers from inside. Published in 1843, it remains among Poe's darkest studies of guilt.
The tale first ran in the Saturday Evening Post on August 19, 1843, when the paper was temporarily calling itself the United States Saturday Post, and was quickly reprinted in Baltimore and Pensacola. Readers liked it enough to inspire parodies. Its speaker is unnamed and unreliable, writing while he waits to be executed, and he opens by admitting he would be mad to expect anyone to believe him.
He describes himself as a lifelong animal lover who, with his wife, keeps many pets, above all a big black cat called Pluto. Drink changes him. After Pluto bites him, he maims and later kills the animal, and that same night his house burns, leaving one wall marked with the giant image of a cat in a noose. A second one-eyed black cat he adopts from a tavern carries a white patch on its chest that slowly seems to form the shape of a gallows. His rage at it ends with his wife's death and a body hidden behind fresh masonry, where the cat has been sealed in too.
Critics often pair it with The Tell-Tale Heart: in both, a killer conceals his deed, believes himself untouchable, and is undone by a reminder he cannot silence. It is also Poe's harshest verdict on alcohol, which the narrator calls a disease and a fiend. The imagery plays on folklore that black cats are witches in disguise, a line Poe joked about as the owner of a black cat himself, and on the Celtic Cat-sìth, a dark feline marked with a white chest spot.
The title has since been borrowed endlessly. Gino Severini painted it in 1910–11. Universal made two Black Cat films with Bela Lugosi that share little but a cat with Poe, while Roger Corman merged it with The Cask of Amontillado in 1962. James Stewart read it for BBC Radio, and in 2023 it named an episode of The Fall of the House of Usher.
Source: The Black Cat (short story)
