Lyssa Henry

Edgar Allan Poe wrote a lot of short stories and poems that captivate people even now, over 100 years after he died. The one that has surprised me the most, though, was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” This was a detective story that set the stage for all other detective stories, but it came wrapped up with a surprise murderer that caught me way off guard. The culprit was not a person as would be expected, but it was a rampaging orangutan that was trying to escape his master’s whip.

How did an orangutan end up committing a murder? This story came out of nowhere. The orangutan escaped from the room it was locked in after it saw its master shaving his face and neck. It wanted to try to shave someone too, as a way of being friendly. When its master saw that it had gotten out, he began to come after the orangutan with a whip to get it to go back in its room. This frightened the orangutan, however, and it escaped into the night. While it was out on \the streets, the orangutan came to a house that had a light on in the window, so it entered, finding an older woman there. The orangutan still wanted to be nice, so it began to shave her neck. After it started, though, the woman, understandably, screamed. This frightened the orangutan, so it jerked and accidentally slit the woman’s neck so far that it almost came off of her body. The woman’s daughter was next. The orangutan next grabbed the daughter’s neck (again, too hard) and choked and scratched her to death. Now the orangutan had two dead women and a fear that its master would find it. The only thing it could think to do in order to avoid the whip was to hide the bodies. The orangutan shoved the body of the daughter up the chimney head-down, and threw the old woman out the window and was finally caught by its master.

What this story taught me is that there are no rules when it comes to a good plot twist. The way that things were laid out gave clues that the murderer may not have been human, but in my mind, the murderer was just someone that spoke a language no one else at the scene happened to know. The story showed me that, as long as you get the point across and write it well, there are no limits to what a writer can do with their story. If Edgar Allan Poe can write stories about hot air balloons, orangutans, murderers, and psychopaths, still retaining his fame and status as an amazing writer, I can write a story about cucumbers going through the process of becoming pickles (I really did write this story) and still not be considered a bad writer by the standards of the world.

If more people wrote with the confidence of Poe, literature today would be wild. There would be no boundaries for the content people submitted, and the number of people that were suspected as crazy would either drastically increase or drastically decrease. Either way, the result would be something I think is amusing. Even though the rest of the world, the people that actually follow current events and would notice the surplus of crazy people, might not be comfortable, the change would at least be enough to make me laugh, which would be worth the damage.