The Black Cat

The Black Cat is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843.

The narrator begins by assuring the reader that he is not mad and that the account he is about to give is plain. He was, he says, a man with a fondness for animals, and his wife shared it; of all their pets he liked a black cat called Pluto best. Drink changed him, and the story follows what he did when the animal began to avoid him: an eye put out with a knife, a hanging, a burned house with an image on the last standing wall, and a second cat found in a tavern that follows him home and will not leave him alone. Poe writes the story as a confession in which the horror is the ordinary escalation of cruelty, and the ending depends on a detail the narrator cannot explain away. It is one of the clearest examples of his interest in a narrator who is guilty and cannot stop talking.

The story belongs with Poe's other tales of self-destruction, and it is built so that the reader works out what has happened a moment before the man telling it does.