style of writing to present his narrator as the very embodiment of insanity while simultaneously having that narrator object to any suchcharacterization:

My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but horror . . .

Those sentences definitely fit into the horror story mold, as does the narrative that follows. Poe’s narrator is in prison, about to be executed for the crime of murder. What follows is the history of the narrator’s relationships with his wife and, more importantly, with the two black cats that populate the story. The narrator relates how, in his drunken stupor, he brutally cuts out one of the eyes of his beloved pet Pluto, a large black cat, and subsequently kills it. His descent into insanity now initiated, he will, in the process of attempting to kill another black cat—one that the narrator imagines has upon its torso a large white splotch that gradually assumes the form of the previously-murdered feline—murders his wife instead:

Goaded by the interference into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot without a groan. This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body.

“The Black Cat” is a horror story. It was written to frighten readers. So successful was Poe in composing horrific imagery that his stories are studied well-over a hundred years after his premature death. These narratives are properly categorized as “horror stories” alongside others of this genre, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Unlike these famous novels, however, Poe’s narratives inhabited the minds of the homicidal and the insane, and that can be infinitely more disturbing than make-believe monsters and vampires.

Literary horror is supposed to scare or terrorize us, even perhaps inspiring disgust in its readers. For this reason, I think this particular story absolutely can be called a horror story. The narrator seems like a relatively nice guy, at first. He sounds reasonable, and he even tells us how he was "noted for the docility and humanity" of his character when he was young. However, apparently alcoholism, in part at least, turns this otherwise good man into an absolute monster. He cruelly murders his cat, a defenseless creature who loved him: this is certainly disgusting. It is horrifying to put oneself in the shoes of his wife; she marries a good man who turns out to be a monster—a man who violently murders her because she defended their cat. For these reasons, I think we can safely call this a horror story.

Horror stories usually have some pretty common elements:  Violence, the supernatural, dead things never quite dying, trustworthy characters turning out to be untrustworthy, and murder.  "The Black Cat" has all of those elements, to be sure.  We have a man who, at the beginning, is a kind, loving husband and caregiver to animals.  By the end he is abusive and violent, even killing his wife unexpectedly, and wreaking havoc on his pets.  He is violent, and the story has some very gory details to it in describing the black cat's demise, and also his gruesome murder of his wife.  There is the supernatural through the "visions" the man has of the cat, and also in the end as the cat is apparently not dead, but alive and well in the wall.  All of these factors lend themselves well to the horror genre.

One last element of the horror genre that the story has is a main character with a very interesting psychology.  At its heart, the story is really a tale of a man who, through the abuse of alcohol, becomes victim to the demons of his mind and his vices.  It is written through the narrator's eyes; he himself describes his slow descent into madness and violence.  He can explain, quite lucidly at a later date, what happened to him.  His mind starts playing tricks on him; he doubts his sanity, and it leads him to do some pretty awful things.  When we are unsure of our own mental soundness, everything is strange and bizarre, and we get to see that through the eyes of the narrator himself.  His psychology is quite interesting, and despite his descent into moral decay, he relates the events of the story quite clearly after the fact.

I hope that helps; good luck!

As in many of Poe’s stories, "The Black Cat" employs a  narrator who spends the entire story trying to convince the reader (and most importantly himself) about his mental stability.  Obviously, when a man commits the heinous crimes that this man has, there is something terribly wrong.

The story would certainly qualify for the horror genre of stories.  The details of the story feature the murder of the narrator’s wife, burying an axe in her head.  To add to the horrific crime, the man walls up his wife's body  in the cellar of their house. The point of view is first person with the narrator sitting in jail awaiting his execution the next day.

Nothing constitutes revulsion more than the maiming of an innocent animal.  The cutting out of the cat’s eye both shocks and disgusts.  Taking the horror to the next level, the man hangs the cat on a limb of a tree in the yard.  What really amazes the reader is that the narrator once loved Pluto, his beautiful, black cat.

Pluto—this was the cat’s name—was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house

The narrator,  as his tells his story the night before his execution,  does not connect the dots of his descent into lunacy:

• The name of the cat is Pluto: the Roman god of the underworld [hell].
• Another cat shows up with a white spot in the shape of the gallows [a little of Poe’s foreshadowing] with a missing eye no less.
• He blames everything on his drinking.

My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. 

• The night he kills the cat his house burns, taking all of his possessions.

My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thence forward to despair.

• He explains away the disturbing bas relief of the hanging cat on the wall in the ruins of his house.  [Remember the name of the car was Pluto.]
• After the death of his wife, the narrator shows no remorse or grief. 

The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little.

• He accepts no responsibility for his actions.

The corpse, already greatly decayed andclotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder...

Of course, what had the cat done but survive on the flesh of the body of the wife.

Poe’s short stories deal with death, graves, near-death, and beating hearts of the dead. None of those stories surpass the dreadfulness of this chronicle of a man driven by alcoholism and insanity to murder and maiming.  This is a horror story of the highest order.