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In his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe famously declares that, rather than following "the usual mode of constructing a story" by focusing on plot, he "prefer[s] commencing with the consideration of an effect" (ER, 13). Authors and critics alike have labeled Poe as the writer to whom "we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state"—"a brand indelibly associated with terror."1 This emphasis on "effect" is crucial to understanding Poe's ability to create terror. But how was he able to imbue his work with an affect strong enough to trigger the transmission of terror so successfully across his texts and to his readers? To explain the origin of Poe's terror, it might seem obvious to point to his preoccupation with death, to his inherently creepy interest in such topics as living burial, cursed houses, murder, and torture. But these are the stuff of narrative—of plot—and the writer has given us cause to go beyond such explanation.
Poe, I will argue, creates his affect of terror by instituting a persistent sensorial overload and a variety of perspectives that overwhelm his characters. To support this claim about Poe's mechanics of terror, I not only perform close readings of two of his tales but also make use of a number of data visualizations of his entire short-story corpus. Throughout his fiction, Poe relentlessly calls attention to the senses—most prominently to sight and sound. His narrators hear strange sounds and see ghastly figures and other portents of their own doom. Entire passages are dedicated to describing the experience of seeing and hearing within the fictive space.2 These narrativizations of sensorial experience are highly detailed, yet Poe's accounts of physical events are persistently ambiguous. David Punter's insistence that Edmund Burke's 1757 aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful was vitally important to the development of gothic writing is helpful in exploring the purpose of Poe's constant ambiguity.3 Comparing the powers of visual and literary arts, Burke argues that paintings give the viewer a clear idea of an object, while verbal descriptions create a "very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects." "But then," he goes on, "it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion