We haven’t really talked about an Edgar Allan Poe story for a while, so let’s fix that. Of course, the one that I decided to choose is probably one of his most uncomfortable story, “The Black Cat.”

So, the story contains depictions of animal abuse and domestic violence, so it’s got that going for it.

We begin with the narrator talking about how he’s not crazy, which is very convincing. In fact, he’s so not crazy that he’s about to tell us the completely not-buckwild story that resulted in him currently being in prison. Spoiler: he killed somebody.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that. He begins with a brief overview of his childhood, where he talks about how much he loved animals. He loved them so much, in fact, that as soon as he got married he and his wife went out and adopted a metric fuckton of critters. The one that he wants to point us to, in particular, is a large black cat named Pluto.

At first things are pretty awesome. Pluto loves him human and follows him everywhere, to the point where he’d follow the narrator into the street if he was allowed. Which is super sweet and cute! Then the narrator starts drinking heavily, which is where things stop being cute and sweet.

See, the narrator is an extremely angry drunk, and violent. So Pluto basically starts to actively avoid him. This pisses him off further, and he decides to deal with this by gouging the cat’s eye out with a pen-knife So, first off, fuck this guy. Second, the wife doesn’t seem to notice, which is weird, as if my cat suddenly lost an eye I’d be a touch concerned.

Anyway, the narrator starts to feel kind of bad about what he’s done, but not bad enough to stop drinking. Pluto recovers, but now is not only trying to avoid him, but actively runs from him whenever he enters. This contributes to another bout of drunken rage, until the narrator decides to take the cat out and hang him from a tree.

I will say it again: fuck this guy.

The next night, the narrator’s bed curtains catch on fire. He, his wife, and a servant try to put out the fire, but it ends up burning down the house. Which is bad for the wife and servant, but good for him, because he is a dickhead. The next day, he returns to the smoking ruin and finds one of the walls in the bedroom is still intact. And appears to have gained a relief of a cat with a noose around its neck.

This freaks out the narrator a bit, but he waves it away by saying a passerby must have tossed Pluto’s corpse through the window to try and wake them up, and that the image got pressed into the wall somehow. I don’t really think it works that way, but whatever lets you sleep at night.

An indeterminate amount of time passes, and the cat becomes nostalgic for his old cat. His cat that he horrifically murdered, I must needs remind you. And he’s in luck, as he finds a cat that looks very much like Pluto, missing eye and all. The only difference is that, while Pluto was all black, this cat has a white patch on his chest.

After determining that this new cat has no owner, he brings him home, much to his wife’s delight. And nothing bad happens!

I’m lying. More very bad things happen. First off, the narrator hasn’t really stopped his drinking, so he starts to get irritated at this cat too. In fact, the more affection the cat shows him, the more irritated he gets, to the point that he starts to flat out hate the cat. It doesn’t really help that the white patch on the cat’s chest is starting to look an awful lot like a noose.

One day, while the narrator and his wife are heading to the cellar, the cat gets underfoot and almost trips him. This causes the narrator to flip the fuck out, so he grabs an axe to kill the cat. His wife tries to stop him, so he decides to vent his rage on her instead.

By burying the axe in her head.

He realizes that he’s really in for it now, as he’s actually murdered a human being, and tries to figure out the best way to hide the body. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that he should tear up one of the walls, stick the corpse behind it, then plaster over it. He does this, and looks for the cat to finish the job. The cat, thankfully, is nowhere to be found, so he goes about his day.

Three days pass with uneventfully. Then, on the fourth day, the police decide to pay him a visit, since, you know, no one’s seen his wife for several days. He’s pretty confident, though, and leads the police around the house, bragging about how well constructed it is.

They make it down to the basement, and it looks like the narrator’s about to get away with it. Except, when the police are about to leave, they hear an inhuman wailing coming from the wall. The police are a bit suspicious, and tear down the wall. Where they, of course, locate the corpse with the cat sitting on top. It turns out that the narrator walled the cat up with his wife on accident.

So, one of the first things you may notice is a similarity to “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both are stories about guilt, but they do have some differences. Mainly the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” didn’t kill any cats, just his roommate. Also, in the other story, the narrator is driven mad by guilt, which prompts him to confess. The narrator in “The Black Cat” was caught because he was too stupid to notice he’d walled up a whole-ass cat.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go give my own cat a hug.