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Going into this thinking it would be another creepy horror, I was pleasantly mistaken to find quite a lengthy short story that appeared to be a mystery. With so much detail we at first think that Legrand is going crazy, but madness is not the case. A loner who lives on a remote island, he likes to collect shells and bugs, which is where the story begins as our narrator tells us about him. Then we hear about this gold bug Legrand has found and how his behavior begins to change afterwards. His slave, Jupiter, who has been released from slavery but stays with Legrand out of loyalty, comes to our narrator, worried that this bug is driving his master insane. The narrator comes to visit and at first must agree with Jupiter. Legrands behavior is eccentric and unusual, and he is worried for his friend.

One of my favorite parts of this story is that Legrand is not suffering from madness, just an extreme intellect which he uses to solve the mystery. And when he involves his friend and Jupiter, he used their apparent belief in his madness to his own advantage, playing it up a big for fun. I loved how Legrand aided their belief of his insanity until he could reveal the true nature of the bug.
The biggest part of this story is the reveal, as Poe goes to great lengths to explain every part of the mystery and how Legrand figured it out. Even the cipher is written and explained which I loved. Apparently there have been many misprinting’s on the online story and its cipher, which is interesting in and of itself.

Overall, the story was very good, and it was highly enjoyable to see each aspect of the mystery explained. Even the Sherlock Holmes stories don’t go into as much detail explaining how the mystery was figured out. Poe surprises and delights me yet again in this story. He’ll always be one of my favorite authors.