Ok, I am having a tough time with Ligeia. I loved the ghost story part of this. Crimony, I wanted to shoot up out of my chair and go screaming from the room! The suspense was spectacular! I mean, could you imagine, your dead spouse suddenly re-animating and walking across the room toward you while still in their shroud?! Granted, this would be more horrifying if it were in a gothic setting, and if there were all kinds of Egyptian funerary objects scattered around the room, but thankfully, those things were present in Ligeia. But the first half of this story went on entirely too long. The narrator babbled on so much about Ligeia's large black eyes, (eyes that seemed much larger than those of normal people), and about her superior intelligence, that I began to think, "What is he describing here, an alien?!" Really, it left the realm of gothic romance and wandered into the realm of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So for me, Poe just spent too much time on (ridiculously flowery) verbal portraiture of Ligeia the woman, and not enough time freaking me out with what could have been a truly great ghost story!
