Horror and humor sometimes lie too close together for comfort. No better instance of this uneasy conjunction could be found than in the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. By the slightest of twists, Poe turns a farcical situation into nightmare. He cultivates exaggeration, inflating his style until it glimmers with little flashes of hysteria.What makes it all the scarier is that the hysteria is so analytical. In Poe, reason itself appears as a form of hallucination.

Last Saturday, October 7, marked the anniversary of Poe’s ignominious death in 1849, in the drunk tank of Baltimore’s Washington College Hospital. Found half-conscious in the gutter, dressed in somebody else’s ill-fitting clothes, Poe slipped in and out of delirium during the four days it took him to die. His doctor concluded that Poe hadn’t been drinking, but he was unable to diagnose his condition; in fact, nobody knows what caused his death, though everything from a “weak heart” to rabies has been suggested. In its unsettling blend of the “grotesque and the arabesque,” his death seems a cruel imitation of his art.

In the quintessential Poe story — all are available in any number of inexpensive editions — the unnamed narrator is usually afflicted with a terrifying paralysis of the will, a state of death-in-life; at its most extreme, as in “The Premature Burial,” the trance becomes a living entombment. To be buried alive wasn’t only Poe’s worst nightmare: It stood as an analogue of his innermost being. What gives those numbing trances their final frisson of horror — from the fatal stupor of Roderick Usher to the ghastly resurrection of “Ligeia,” perhaps his greatest parable — is their moral dimension. His characters are disfigured by their own overwhelming lucidity; only through suspension of the will, through a kind of moral amnesia, can they act. They commit unspeakable atrocities without the slightest qualm — as in “The Black Cat,” when the narrator in a frenzy of paranoia gouges out the eye of Pluto, his all too aptly named cat — only to plunge into the most searing lucidity after the fact. For Poe, to enact buried impulses, the more shocking the better, is the prerequisite for moral consciousness.

But as Poe discovered, the shock could be enhanced by lacing it slyly with the farcical. Thus, in “Berenice,” one of his most disturbing tales, the narrator grows morbidly fascinated with his beautiful cousin Berenice’s teeth. Poe confessed later that he had first planned “Berenice” as a grotesque comedy, only to realize its greater potential as a horror story; and the traces of almost slapstick humor that remain, verging on self-parody, intensify the story’s quite sickening effect. “The teeth!” exclaims the deranged narrator, “The teeth! They were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them…” He covets those teeth, he longs to have them; the premise is just absurd enough to be convincing. At the end, the narrator wakes from a trance to discover a box “from which there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances” and realizes that he has performed a full extraction on Berenice while she lay in a catatonic stupor. All her beauty — and Berenice herself — has been reduced to a set of chompers. But the horror is moral; it lies in that reduction, at once clinical and monstrous.

Of course, this is high melodrama. Poe was the son of touring actors and no doubt imbibed the conventions of 19th-century melodrama with his mother’s milk. But it suited his teperament. Only melodrama could allow him the simultaneous extremes of hilarity and terror. Sleight-of-hand comes into play too. Poe was on occasion a skilled con man; after being courtmartialled and drummed out of West Point in 1830, he somehow suckered his classmates into taking up a collection to subsidize his first book of poems. He cons the reader too by using the creakiest of genres and every Gothic prop in the book and yet, instead of the familiar and satisfying shiver we anticipate, he offers us icy images of real and appalling evil. Always told in the first person, his tales draw us toward the realization that such unspeakable tendencies live in us too.

Sometimes, especially in the poems, Poe’s love of exaggeration goes too far. It would be difficult to think of a more ridiculous poem than “The Raven.” The rhymes slosh with tidal monotony; the cadences are grossly manipulative; the situation is preposterous. Still, it’s the one poem read in high school that everyone remembers.Why is it unforgettable? Poe wrote it in a calculating mode, gauging every effect, and I think it’s this very staginess that appeals. Of course, French poets took it with the utmost seriousness. Mallarmé translated it into sonorous prose (even if his “jamais plus” will never have the deliciously sepulchral overtones of “Nevermore!”). And there are lines that would turn the woolliest Surrealist green with envy:

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.

The image is so ludicrous as to be sublime; and if you have to ask how a footfall can tinkle, especially on a “tufted floor,” you’ve missed the point. “The Raven” is in fact a nonsense dirge, a sort of “Jabberwocky” from hell. Even so, a few of Poe’s poems are moving and beautiful. In these he sheds the stage-props and speaks from his innermost perplexity. The little lyric “Alone” begins:

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.

I sometimes think that Poe was the loneliest man in America. Like his tortured characters, he was estranged not merely from his fellows but from those he loved most; he recognized himself only in moments of horrified self-awareness. He failed at every venture he turned his hand to; even in death he was vilified by those he trusted. The more he hankered for respectability and acclaim, the more disreputable, and ignored, he found himself to be. He is the nightmare figure in the American dream. Behind the sunniest vistas lurked the imp of the perverse. But his aloneness was in a way his genius, as the closing lines of the poem reveal:

Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From every depth of good or ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by —
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.