In the dark of night, one light still yet burns.

Frightened fingers tremble has brittle pages turn.

Fireside Mystery Theater presents The Midnight Reading,

a summer series of dramatic recitations of dark masterpieces in miniature

by the masters of the macabre. Good evening. I'm James Reeser. Everyone acknowledges that Edgar

Alan Poe almost single-handedly carved the mold from which most modern mystery, horror, and even

science fiction flows.

What fewer seem to point out is that his finest work makes the case that this type of material,

especially material of a macabre, horrific or weird bent, works best in short bursts.

For it is the tale. The story one can spin in a single sitting to a small gathering

around the fire where this type of narrative makes its greatest impact in ways that the longer

form of the novel often fails to sustain. Speaking to that point, tonight's midnight reading,

the oval portrait written by Mr. Poe in 1842,

is one of the very shortest stories in his canon. Here to read it for us as our own Miss Alley-Silva.

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance,

"'rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition,

"'to pass a night in the open air,

"'was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur,

"'which have so long frowned among the Apennines,

"'not less, in in fact than in the fancy

of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned.

We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments.

...