THE EDGAR ALLAN POE AUDIO COLLECTION - Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone

YEAR: 2000

LABEL: Caedmon

TRACK LISTING: To --, Alone, The City in the Sea, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Haunted Palace, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Raven, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Cask of Amontillado, The Bells, Annabel Lee, Eldorado, Ligeia, The Imp of the Perverse, Morella, Berenice, The Gold Bug

IMPRESSIONS: It was so nice to see this CD box set on the audiobook shelf at my Borders in 2000. I snapped it up on 40% off day. As luck would have it, these Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone recordings were ones I hadn't managed to track down up to this point; deriving as they do from some rare 50s LPs long out of print. Price, of course, is a veteran hand at these types of records but Rathbone proves himself every bit as adept reading Poe's immortal tales of terror. The only caveat I have (and its a fairly substantial one) is that the volume level is ridiculously low on these CDs; even when I maxed the volume to put them in my ipod, they are still only just audible. For such melodiously magnificent voices, that is truly a crime worthy of a homicidal ourang-outan!

MY FAVOURITE TRACKS: Alone, The City in the Sea, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Haunted Palace, The Masque of the Red Death, The Black Cat, The Raven, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Cask of Amontillado, The Bells, Annabel Lee, Ligeia, The Imp of the Perverse, Morella

FACT SHEET: THE EDGAR ALLAN POE AUDIO COLLECTION is a 2000 5 CD set consists of several Caedmon albums of Edgar Allan Poe readings by Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price originally released in 1954. All the readings are by Basil Rathbone except LIGEIA, THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE, MORELLA, BERENICE and THE GOLD BUG which are read by Vincent Price.