Edgar Allan Poe Stories Quiz

Answer: The Tell-Tale Heart

This is one of his more popular stories. The man does end up murdering the old man. He suffocates him under a mattress, cuts up the body, and hides it under the floorboards. Police come, since someone reported hearing a scream. The man tells them the old man is gone, and it was himself that screamed.

Then he freaks out because he thinks he hears the dead man's heart beating under the floor, causing him to tell the police he killed him and buried him under the floorboards.

Answer: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

The narrator is very unlucky. The ship he is on has a crew that mutinies and then the ship gets shipwrecked. He is also forced to be a cannibal at one point. It ends with the narrator at the South Pole. Dirk Peters is another character in this book that becomes friends with the narrator.

Answer: The Pit and the Pendulum

At first the narrator is trapped in a room with a giant pit in the middle of it. He almost falls in, but manages not to. He is then drugged, waking up strapped to a board. Above this board is a pendulum with a blade on it. It slowly goes lower and lower until it almost kills him.

He escapes the blade, but is still stuck in the room with the pit. The walls start closing in and he falls into the pit. He doesn't die because at the last moment, a French solider appears and rescues him.

Answer: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The case is strange because the two women were inside a locked room, none of their money was stolen, and nobody saw the murderer leave when people arrived to investigate the screams. It turns out that the murderer came in and then left through the window. The murderer was also an orang-utan.

Answer: The Premature Burial

The man wasn't really buried alive. He was traveling on a ship, and the beds were built into the wall and had doors on them. He was sleeping in one, and when he woke up, he thought he was in a coffin. He screams, and another person opens the door. He then realizes he is on a boat, and not buried alive.

Answer: The Cask of Amontillado

When the narrator and Fortunato are in the cellar, the narrator gets Fortunato drunk with a bunch of wine. The narrator then chains him to a wall in an alcove. Then he proceeds to block of the alcove by building a wall, brick by brick. When he finishes, he just leaves Fortunato to suffocate.

Answer: The Fall of the House of Usher

One night, the brother gets really bad. The narrator starts reading him a story, only to be interrupted by strange noises. Then the brother revels that he had buried Madeline alive. Madeline then appears at the door and murders her brother. The narrator escapes, and the House of Usher falls.

Answer: The Raven

In the middle of the night, a raven flies into the man's chamber. It sits on top of a bust of Pallas Athena, and keeps saying, "Nevermore". Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" explains how Poe came up with the poem.

Answer: The Black Cat

After the man killed Pluto, he found another cat, which was similar to Pluto except for its chest was white. The cat follows him everywhere, which starts to really annoy him. One day, he just can't stand it following him and tries to kill it with an ax. Instead, he manages to kill his wife.

Answer: Hopfrog

The court jester gets revenge by convincing the king and his cabinet to dress up as apes for a fancy ball the king is having. He then sets them on fire during the ball. He then escapes with his friend.