Harry Clarke's Premature Burial — Poe's Tales of Mystery, 1919

Underground, a figure claws desperately at the lid of a wooden coffin, wide-eyed with horror — buried alive beneath the earth's surface. Above, roots pierce downward through layers of soil toward the desperate figure, while at the surface, ghostly organic forms writhe in a nightmarish garden. Below the main coffin, skeletal remains and broken wood hint at older burials. Harry Clarke's signature pen-and-ink mastery turns Edgar Allan Poe's most visceral dread into a monument of Gothic terror.