"THOU ART THE MAN!" (1844)

I haven't read enough Gothics to be sure what was the first time anyone used the trope of the "phantasmal figuration"-- which usually, though not always, consists of the attempt of some character in a story to project the illusion of some weird or supernatural entity. However, "Thou Art the Man" *might* be the first time anyone created such an illusion for the purpose of causing a criminal to expose himself. (Granted, Hamlet crafts a play designed to "catch the conscience of the king," but the performance doesn't create any illusion as such, it merely makes King Claudius nervous enough to retaliate.)

An unnamed narrator follows the case of an apparent murder-victim, the wealthy Barnabas Shuttleworthy. The narrator doesn't reveal his suspicions to the reader, but describes in detail the ways in which Shuttleworthy's boon friend  Charles Goodfellow conveniently finds enough clues to condemn another local of the crime (though as yet Shuttleworthy's body has not been found by police). The narrator finds the body, though, and uses the corpse and his own ventriloquist skills to make Goodfellow confess his guilt--after which the murderer drops dead and the innocent man is released.

Clearly in this story of detection, Poe was less interested in touting the superiority of the sleuth than in satirizing the stupidity of the townspeople.

MESMERIC REVELATION (1844)

Mesmerism is merely a means for Poe to unleash another of his Poe's philosophical-discourses-in-tale-form. Over a series of treatments, an unnamed narrator uses mesmerism on an asthma-sufferer named Vankirk. VanKirk goes into a trance and tells the narrator that he's passed into a half-world between life and death. The hypnotized man relates his insights into the commensurate nature of God, the universal mind, and "unparticled matter."

This is clearly Poe trying to reconcile theism with the physics-discoveries of his time. Within the story there's no proof of Vankirk's exegesis, except for one odd aftermath. Vankirk dies, and the narrator observes that in less than a minute the man's body "had all the rigidity of stone." I would term this trope "freakish flesh" in that the reader cannot be sure that it's anything but a physiological effect brought on by the sufferer's unique mental condition.

THE BALLOON-HOAX, A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS(1844)

Once again Poe tries his hand at using his ratiocinative talents to put across a hoax. But whereas "Hans Pfall" at least a few amusing moments, "Balloon-Hoax" is utterly mundane, "fantastic" only in terms that Poe couldn't know exactly what elements would be needed for a balloon-ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Forgettable in almost every way.

A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS, however, is definitely underrated "Marvelous Poe." An unnamed narrator describes his friendship with a fellow named Augustus Bedloe, whose entire body had become rather elongated due to his suffering from neuralgia. Bedloe has been treated for years by a private doctor, Templeton, who is a follower of the doctrines of Mesmer, though mesmerism seems to play no role in the story.

Bedloe disappears from Charlottesville, the city in which he and the narrator reside. When Bedloe shows up at last, he tells a story of having got lost in the neighboring mountain range, the Ragged Mountains. Bedloe tells his friend and his doctor that before going for a walk in the mountains, he had a breakfast of coffee and pain-killing morphine. He then stumbled across a city and took part in an armed conflict before finding himself alone again. Templeton believes that Bedloe experienced a flashback to an earlier life, when a man named Oldeb, an acquaintance of the doctor, died during a riot in Benares, India.  A little later, Bedloe perishes in a manner loosely similar to the fate of Oldeb, whose name is almost exactly the same.

There are strong parallels between this story and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," published in 1816.