Compare and Contrast Two Short Stories From Different Time Periods, But From the Same Genre

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Compare and Contrast two short stories from different time periods,

 But from the same genre

In this essay I will compare the pre 20th Century text “The Black Cat” (1843) by Edgar Allen Poe and the post 20th Century text “Hell’s Event” (1984) by Clive Barker both of which are horror stories.

Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston, USA in 1809.  He had a brother, Henry, and a sister, Rosaline. In December of 1812 the children were orphaned and the family was split up.  Henry stayed in Baltimore with his grandparents.  Edgar and Rosaline Poe were taken in by wealthy Richmond families, Rosaline by the Mackenzies and Edgar by the Allans. In 1827 prior to enlisting in the army Edgar wrote his first two poems known as “To Margaret” and “To Octavia”.  By 1833 Edgar had begun to write stories and in 1835 he married his cousin, Virginia but she died 12 years later.  On 7 October 1849 at about 4.30pm Poe died.  The actual cause of death at the relatively young age of 40 has never been confirmed.  Poe was buried in his grandfather’s lot in the Westminster burying ground.

Throughout his life Poe had been victimised and taken advantage of and I think this may have influenced some of his texts.

Clive Barker was born near Penny Lane, Liverpool in 1952. After attending junior school in that city, He entered Liverpool University to study English literature and philosophy. At the age of 21 he moved to London. There, he formed a theatre company to perform plays that he had written, and worked in that medium throughout his twenties as a writer, a director and an actor.

About himself, Clive writes: "My enthusiasm as an artist is rooted not in any particular medium, but in the act of imaging. My books, films, drawings and plays, thought they may seem to be very disparate in content, are still mapping out different parts of the same landscape: that is to say, the world between my ears, I am motivated to write or paint by the images and scenes which arise from my subconscious, without invitation, which seems on closer inspection to dramatize elements of my deeper self.

Unlike Poe, Barker didn’t have an unhappy childhood and had a good university education and as he says above he uses thoughts form his subconscious to influence his experience rather than as perhaps in Poes case, perhaps real life events.

Hells event is about a race between Heaven and Hell to see which will be in power for the next hundred years, the contenders for Heaven don’t know about the importance of the race, they think it is just another race. There are four contenders for Heaven, Nick Loyer, Joel Jones, Frank McCloud and Lester Kinderman. The contender for Hell is Malcolm Voight although he is actually three people, he is one of three familiars from hell, the idea being that they all run a one third of the race, Burgess is the familiars master and he appears quite a lot in the story as does hell itself. Joel Jones is one of the main characters in the story, as is Cameron, his coach. Joel is killed towards the end of the race and it looks like Voight is going to win. But just before the line he is taken over by Kinderman.

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The Black Cat is about a man who used to be an animal lover and had a large variety of pets including birds, goldfish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey and a cat called Pluto. Over the years the man grew moody and irritable and swore and hit his wife, he neglected and ill-used his pets all except Pluto. But as the man got steadily worse he started mistreating Pluto. Eventually the man hung Pluto from a tree and on that night his house burned down. The man survived and the morning after the fire came back to the ...

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