This paper deals with the unusual life and creativity of E. A. Po who is the forerunner of, what is later to be known as, criminal, detective or horror novels. Romanticism is described as a literary period with an emphasis on its theme with regard to the relation to the unexplainable, mystical, fantastic. In the period of romance, a wider circle of readers is created, believing that the principles of real perception are intuition, imagination and mind, and part of this work also explains the role of readers. It is emphasized that fantastic literature is developing within the epoch of romanticism, in which we recognize the romantic tendency of "escape from reality" into the world of imagination. This world is built on the fantastic and on suspicion and swirling of readers and figures. Literary theorist Cvetan Todorov deals with the fantastic, strange and miraculous aspects that are also the basis of the analysis of Poe's work. The theme of fantasy relies on "I - themes" that deal with the relationship between man and the world, that is, the separation of man from the world, and the „you - themes" that deal with the human relation towards his desires and unconscious impulses. This paper also addressed Gothic literature. By reading and observing the elements of fantasy and gothic, short stories can be classified into a genre of fantastic, but a closer analysis, carried out on a structural and semantic level, leads to the conclusion that the stories actually belong to the genre of miraculous or strange. The clasification of a piece of work to a particular genre of fantastic literature is corroborated by examples from the analized stories . Selected texts contain mystical elements and elements of personal preoccupation, especially the feelings of passion, loneliness, alienation, fear and horror.