Once a week, at least, I continue to read to my nieces, sharing some of my favorite works and authors in my continuing effort to warp their young, impressionable minds in ways their parents may not always approve.

Given the disparate ages of my nieces, the books I read to them often vary wildly. The youngest girl, Rebekah, is still mostly getting picture books. This past weekend, I read her a Pete the Cat book to her great enjoyment. 

The middle girl, Miriam, has reached the age where she can focus on what the kids still call chapter books, so the two of us have been working our way through The Chronicles of Narnia for the past several months. We just finished “The Silver Chair,” which means we’re a little over halfway through the series in the old (and superior) order based on publication dates. 

Kara, however, at the ripe old age of 11, hovering at the age of that magical liminal space that is the “tween,” is looking for somewhat more sophisticated material at this point. And after sharing “The Lord of the Rings” with her, it’s hard to find books that can live up to that level without feeling like a step down for our reading time. 

Also, given the month, Kara demanded something spooky, which is a problem. She’s already passed the point where “Goosebumps” is going to be particularly effective, but she’s definitely not ready for, say, Stephen King, yet. 

(I’m just waiting for the green light, though, as I’ve got plenty of those to share, as you may recall).

So, looking for something that would please her, pass her parents’ tests of “age appropriate”-ness and not bore me to tears while we’re at it, I cast about for a new reading project and found ol’ Edgar Allan Poe waiting for me. 

I first read Poe when I was younger than Kara is now, and his tales of premature burials, deadly plagues, macabre felines, killer apes and more murders than you can fit in a decaying charnel house resonated with my morbid young tastes immediately. 

And with Kara also looking for some murder mysteries in her literary diet, going back to the man who invented the modern detective story seemed like a good fit. 

So far we’ve read more than half a dozen of Poe’s most famous stories, occasionally leavened with a personal favorite of mine like “Hop-Frog,” and Kara is definitely enjoying the experience. 

It was a bit rough going at first, mind you. Poe writes in that overly verbose style that was all the rage 150 years ago or more, which means I occasionally had to pause after a half-page long paragraph and essentially paraphrase it all over again for my niece so she understood what all his 10-dollar words were trying to say. 

Poe also loves to throw in untranslated bits of French and Latin, which leave even me stymied, and the endnotes in my edition are only of limited use at times. 

But I faced the same problems at her age, so we continued to muddle through and, once we reached the meat of the stories, found that the same dark, gothic weirdness that attracted me as a young boy has the same hypnotic pull on an 11-year-old girl with a slightly morbid streak. 

She loved the double murder in a locked room mystery in “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” even after the five-page introduction explaining Poe’s pet theories on rational deduction. 

She thrilled at the decadent bacchanal that led to the plague-ridden death of Prospero’s court in “Masque of the Red Death,” almost as much as she enjoyed the chilling idea of being entombed alive in the collapsing manor house of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 

And I know the stories are sticking with her beyond just a momentary frisson of macabre creepiness. Reading “The Pit and the Pendulum” to her on Sunday (after a brief explanation of the Spanish Inquisition, that is) , the suggestion of a mysterious sound in the pitch-black torture chamber had her enthusiastically echoing the end of our first Poe venture together, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 

Hearing an adolescent girl happily wonder if it could be “the beating of his hideous heart” with enthusiastic bloodthirst is definitely one of my prouder moments as an uncle. 

We’ve still got plenty of Poe ahead of us. She especially wants to tackle the other detective stories in Poe’s body of work, and there are some major milestone works like “The Black Cat” and “Ligeia” still to read. 

But the heavy lifting is already over. I’ve successfully created another Poe fan.

Stephen Milligan is the managing editor of The Walton Tribune, a sister publication of The Covington News. He can be reached at stephen.milligan@waltontribune.com.