The Black Cat

Actor Christopher Lee hosts this series of 13 Edgar Allen Poe's short stories. The Black Cat, short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August 1843 and included in the collection Tales by Edgar Allen Poe (1845). The story’s main character is an animal lover who, as he descends into alcoholism and perverse violence, begins mistreating his wife and his black cat Pluto. When Pluto attacks him in self-defense one night, he seizes the cat in a fury, cuts out one of its eyes, and hangs it. That night a fire destroys his house, leaving him in dire poverty. He finds a new house, and inside that house a stray cat with only one eye, the wife and husband move in and he adopts the cat in order to redeem his house. Soon he begins to loathe the cat. In a fit of rage attempts to kill the cat with an ax. His wife stops him, and he kills her instead. He buries the body in the wall of a basement. When police investigate the missing person and search the house, they can hear something in the wall, when they knock down the wall they discover the cat on top of his dead wife's head.