In 1839 The Southern Literary Messenger rejected Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'. Its Gothic terror, he was told, was no longer in vogue: 'I doubt very much whether tales of the wild, improbable and terrible class can ever be permanently popular in this country. Charles Dickens, it appears to me, has given the final death blow to writings of that decription.'1 Over a century and a half later, when this and several other of Poe's tales of the terrible class appear to have achieved a popularity as permanent as Dickens's, such a judgement seems curious, but it can alert us to a struggle to win and hold readers that was not only played out in the production and reception of his tales but is also inscribed within them. All of Poe's writing, including his criticism and poetry, his detective stories, burlesques, parodies, and hoaxes, pursues and reflects on this struggle for the control of reading, which reaches its greatest intensity and complexity in his tales of terror. As a reviewer, Poe gave high praise to Dickens's early fiction, but he also used it to stage a formal conflict between the looseness of the serialized novel and the concentration of the tale.2 Concerned, as always, with 'unity of effect', he stresses the potential and demands of the 'brief article' as opposed to the 'common novel' (p. 205) and celebrates the force of such unity when he finds it in the Sketches, for example, 'the Pawnbroker's Shop engages and enchains our attention' (p. 206). Similarly, in Pickwick he passes over the main narrative to demonstrate Dickens's 'powers as a prose writer' by reprinting one of the interpolated tales, 'A Madman's Manuscript' (p. 207), while in reviewing The Old Curiosity Shop he points out inconsistencies the serial writer had no chance to remove, 'one among a hundred instances of the disadvantage under which the periodical novelist labors' (p. 213), and extricates from the awkward framework of Master Humphrey's Clock 'the Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second [...] a paper of remarkable power' (p. 212). The tales Poe praises are like several of his own, brief first-person narratives of madness and crime that trace the growth of obsession, the destruction of innocent victims, and the exposure of