Sublime

Where the horrors of actual human suffering fell short, his own imagination provided the more-extreme elements, transforming the merely shocking into the truly appalling. No depth had he not plumbed. From no horror had he averted his eyes.

Malevolence inside and outside is key to the supernatural as imagined by Edgar Allan Poe. Humans are not innocent beings assaulted by dreadful forces over which they have no control; the human psyche is the door that is left open. Such troubling questions, and their terrifying conclusions, would resurface again, much later, in the work of Shirley J