This classic horror short story was originally titled: Hop-Frog:, or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs and published March 17, 1849 in the Flag of our Union magazine, about six months before the death of Edgar Allan Poe. When “Hop-Frog” was published, Poe and his wife Virginia (now deceased) had suffered many years of rumors and untruths spread by his enemies. Nearly a month earlier, on February 14, 1849, Poe wrote his good friend Frederick William Thomas:
I have been quite out of the literary world for the last three years, and have said
little or nothing, but, like the owl, I have “taken it out in thinking”. By and bye I mean to come out of the bush, and then I have some
old scores to settle. . . . The fact is, Thomas, living buried in the country makes a man savage– wolfish. I am just in the humor for a fight.
“Hop-Frog” is Poe’s tale of ultimate revenge against his male literary detractors, most of whom he panned in his “The Literati of New York City” series in 1846. "Hop-Frog" makes you feel for Tripetta and Hop-Frog more than a lot of Poe short stories. It is, however, by no means his best horror short story as you will see in the coming weeks, but it still rises above most in this nascent genre from 1800-1850. Consider this passage as Poe extracts his revenge on his literary detractors:
Owing to the high combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light.
On the minus side, the story itself feels a bit forced and the outcome, though surprising and horrific, lacks a certain thoroughness of design that prevents this tale from being in the Top 10 or even the Top 20 classic horror short stories from 1800-1849.
