"A Predicament" is a humorous short story by Edgar Allan Poe, usually combined with its companion piece "How to Write a Blackwood Article".

While walking through "the goodly city of Edina" with her 5-inch-tall (130 mm) poodle and her 3-foot-tall (0.91 m) black servant, Pompey, she is drawn to a large Gothic cathedral.

It serves as a satirical "how-to" fiction on formulaic horror stories typically printed in the Scottish Blackwood's Magazine.

Originally pairing them together as "The Psyche Zenobia" and "The Scythe of Time", Poe first published these pieces in the American Museum based in Baltimore, Maryland in November 1838.

[3] In satirizing the tropes of these types of stories, Poe also burlesques many of the literary devices he would use in his own tales, including a character in a desperate situation and the use of French or German expressions.

[6] Additionally, Poe mocks political writing and plagiarism of the period by depicing the editor with three apprentices who use tailor shears to cut apart other articles and splice them together.