The Black Cat ; By Edgar Allan Poe

The narrator explains that as a child, he’d preferred animals to people. When he grew up, he married and his wife filled their home with pets, including a large, clever black cat, Pluto, which was his favorite. Yet the narrator started to become increasingly temperamental and angry. Eventually he even took things out on Pluto and one day was so frustrated that he gouged out the cat’s eye. Though the cat avoided his master for a while, he soon came back, more affectionate than ever, as if taunting his conscience, until it became too much for the narrator and he killed the animal by hanging him on a garden tree.

That night, the narrator’s house caught on fire. The narrator and his wife escaped but when they return the next day, they find that sole remaining wall has on it the shape of the black cat in the plaster.

The narrator starts drinking and one day, in a bar, he sees another black cat sitting on a barrel, an exact double of Pluto apart from a patch of white on its breast. He takes the animal home, but his affection for it is very short lived and its similarity to Pluto soon begins to unnerve him to the point of fury. The patch of white also begins to resemble a gallows and reminds the narrator of his guilt.

The narrator becomes crueler than he’s ever been, but the cat is insistently affectionate. One day he tries to kill the cat, but when his wife tries to stop him, he kills her instead. He hides her body in the wall. The black cat disappears. Four days later the police come, asking to search the property. The narrator shows them around, confident of his concealment of the body. His bravado increases and he even knocks the wall hiding his wife’s body with his stick for show. A horrible sound comes from the wall. The police knock down the wall and discover the body and on top of it, the black cat, which had been buried alive.