A nervous narrator insists he is sane, then tells you how he killed an old man because of his pale blue eye, and what he heard afterwards.
A twelve-minute read that is still one of the most effective horror stories in English: one voice, one room, and a sound that will not stop. The 1843 vocabulary needs a few lookups, which is why we made a read-along. Four and a half out of five (our opinion, draft for review).
Every guide comes as a video and a full written article. Pick the one you need: the review is spoiler-free, the ending explained is not.
This is the full text of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), read aloud word for word in about twelve minutes. The video highlights each word as it is spoken, so you can follow the original 1843 wording, and…
The Tell-Tale Heart is a short horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. An unnamed narrator swears he is not mad, then explains how he planned and carried out the killing of an old man whose pale blue eye he could not bear, and how a sound he could not stop hearing ended his calm. It is in the public domain, and we worked from the free Project Gutenberg text (ebook 2148).
The audiobook. Our Study Edition audiobook reads the whole story word for word with a synthetic voice, highlights each word on screen as it is spoken, and adds a who’s-who, a few hard words before the story and a short recap after each part. The page for it has the recaps and the word list in writing. The page has full spoilers, since the story is short and the ending is the point.
A twelve-minute read that is still one of the most effective horror stories in English: one voice, one room, and a sound that will not stop. The 1843 vocabulary needs a few lookups, which is why we made a read-along. Four and a half out of five (our opinion, draft for review). Read it if: you want a classic you can finish in one sitting; you like unreliable narrators and horror that lives in the voice; you are studying it for a class and want the whole text and the hard words in one place. Skip it if: you dislike violence, even when it is described briefly; you want a plot with many characters or twists: it has one narrator, one victim and one idea.
