Poor Poe

Before we get started, I want to get something out of the way.

EVERYBODY'S FAVOURITE AUTHOR DURING SOME POINT OF THEIR TEENAGE YEARS WAS EDGAR ALLEN POE.

Everybody. Every-fucking-body. And don't feel the need to write me any love notes about how you were seduced by the heady thematic overtones of Dostoevsky's work during your formative teenage years spent in fucking France, because I will call you a poo-poo head liar. I will even make you a card.

So why does Poe appeal to the socially awkward youth demographic? I dunno. I haven't read his stuff since I was 15.

THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

This story is cited as one of the earliest modern day detective stories, primarily by purists who hate Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and the murderer is an orangutan.

There is very little action, and it all happens off-screen. It's meant to be a purely analytical study. If you aren't able to figure that out by the context, then the text helpfully dumps two paragraphs worth of analytical philosophizing right there at the beginning. Little light reading for ya.

The narrator is some dude who probably has a name that I can't be bothered to search wikipedia for, since that cuts into my making-bad-Paint-pictures time. The actual important person is C. Auguste Dupin, who is obnoxiously French. He's young, independently wealthy, and likes to roam the streets of Paris at night with his friends. Um.

A-anyway, they stumble across a horrible murder in the paper. A woman has been strangled horribly! The neighbors all heard screams! Her body was stuffed up a chimney!

C Auguste Dupin, using the power of his giant upper class brain and the oodles of free time between Twilight cosplays, figures out that the only thing that could have murdered this poor woman was an orangutan. Just... trust him, okay? It helps that a French nobleman can just straight up wander into a crime scene because he 'knows a guy'. Oh, and this happens.

I'm being pretty hard on it, but I just remember the story making a lot more sense when I read it ten years ago. Oh well.