iPoe Collection (for iPad)

True story: The reason why I became a writer is because I was heavily influenced in my youth by Edgar Allan Poe's work. His classic poems and short stories captured by pubescent imagination with tales of horror and suspense. I own several of his collected works as an adult, so it was no surprise that I was compelled to download the iPoe Collection as soon as I learned of its existence. The free iPad app serves up just a handful of tales—"The Oval Portrait," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Annabel Lee," and "The Masque of the Red Death"—but it uses the iPad's audio-visual muscle to bring freshness to the well-known stories.

A Descent into Madness
You start, naturally, at the home screen which drips in the macabre—a black cat, crow, skull, and tombstones populate the area. There are options to change the language (English, French, Spanish), write an App Store review, follow app developer Play Creatividad S.L., on Facebook and Twitter, or drop a line via email. You can also check out a brief Poe biography or flip though a sketchbook that contains additional illustrations. These sections have enabled light user interaction—you can flesh out the sketches by swiping them and adding color, for example—but the bulk of it lies in the actual Poe stories.

Tapping the arrow keys on the largest tombstone cycles through the stories; tapping the story's icon loads the tale. You page through each story as you would a book (each page looks like it was written on browning, ancient parchment), but iPoe Collection adds multimedia to the mix to enhance the reading experience.

Attempt to Adjust the Picture
Sound is used to enhance the insanity that is "The Tell-Tale Heart"—rumbling, eerie music plays throughout, and a heartbeat pounds as the crime is being committed (and during the events afterward). Detailed, well-drawn animated segments are sprinkled in to highlight dramatic moments, but they're limited to just a few frames of animation—these aren't full-on cartoons, after all. On the upside, the pages load quickly, so you don't have to wait for a page to load before advancing.

iPoe also invites you to touch the images. You can rotate certain photos, flip through others, and drag items across the iPad's display. You'll quickly learn to tinker with everything you encounter. Not all the interactions are as big or creepy as dissecting a body with your finger, but they are well-implemented.

The app tinkers with the way it displays text, too, to heighten fright. When the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" creeps into the soon-to-be-murder-victim's pitch-black bedroom, the pages go black with white text. On particular page has just a few visible words—the rest is swallowed by the blackness. When you use your finger to swipe away the blackness to see the rest of the text something...appears. It gave me a legit startle my first time through the story.

Closing Narration
iPoe Collection takes classic Edgar Allan Poe works and gives them a new life through deft multimedia implementation. The app does a fine job of conveying dread; so much so, that my main complaint is that there are just four stories available at the time—I want more! Thankfully, additional stories are planned. It's a minor nitpick, really; Poe fans will find this free app one that's worth a download.

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