For Spooky, Edgar Allan Poe Has Staying Power

The Raven, MWA, Poe

One hundred seventy-one Octobers ago, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore. Judging by the frequency with which cultural references to him and his works pop up—Poe and Raven masks, the Edgar Awards, t-shirts, mugs, you-name-it—it seems he haunts us still. Now, in 2020, perhaps his shade’s message is, “What didn’t you get about ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”

The late mystery writer Julian Symons’s Poe biography, The Tell-Tale Heart, is a painful journey. Time and again, Poe’s precarious financial situation would start to brighten, and time and again, he would get in his own way, sabotaging his prospects.

Poe’s parents were itinerant actors. His heavy-drinking father deserted the family in Poe’s first year, and his mother died of consumption when he was two. Certainly retrospective psychoanalysts of his personality make much of these early traumas. For his part, Symons believes a combination of predilection and early experience marked Poe, ‘and his life can best be understood as a play in which he half-consciously cast himself as a tragic hero.’

He dropped out of the University of Virginia, resentful of the aristocratic young men he met there, and moved to Maryland. In Baltimore, he connected with his aunt and later married her not-quite fourteen-year-old daughter. Having a family gave him a sense of purpose, but the problem then and ever after was earning money.

Today we know Poe best for his short stories, and that one poem. Yet Poe’s greatest desire was to be a poet and literary critic, to have his own magazine. Unfortunately, the caustic reviews he wrote for literary journals cost him many friendships and connections with people who might have helped him. Eventually, Symons says, ‘his drinking and critical quarrelsomeness were too well known for anybody to employ him.’ A modern reader can’t help but think Poe suffered from some psychiatric disorder that today might have been treated.

His last, disastrous decision was to name Rufus Wilmot Griswold his literary executor. For reasons of his own, Griswold made false and scurrilous accusations about Poe’s work and character that tarnished the author’s reputation for nearly a century. To a degree, they persist today.

In the last couple of years, I’ve written two short stories inspired by Poe’s “Berenice,” in which a young man becomes obsessed with his wife’s teeth. After she dies, he yanks them out before her body is relegated to the family crypt. Alas, (and you know this is coming), she isn’t dead.

They appeared in an entertaining anthology of contemporary stories with roots in classic Poe called Quoth the Raven, edited by Lyn Worthen; and in an anthology with the premise that Sherlock Holmes is called in to investigate the strange doings Poe set up. It’s Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Brian and Derrick Belanger. No doubt Poe would never have imagined that the stories he dismissed so casually just to put money in his pocket would continue to fire other writers’ imaginations these many years later.

Photo: c2.staticflickr.com

Notes from the Dark Side

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Here’s news I like to hear from an anthology editor.

Wrote Lyn Worthen, “I am proud to announce that Quoth the Raven, which was recently named the Best Anthology of 2018 by the Critters Workshop/Preditors and Editors Annual Reader’s Poll, is now on the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot.”

In Quoth the Raven, poets and short story authors tell a contemporary tale, riffing on the style and sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s “Berenice” inspired my story, “Tooth and Nail,” and now some of my family members hesitate to be in a room alone with me . . . Nevertheless.

Why Dark Fiction?

My fellow QtR author, Tiffany Michelle Brown interviewed several of the collection’s 32 authors on why they are attracted to dark fiction. “Why do you think we like to read about the things that terrify us?” she asked.

Emerian Rich, author of the story “My Annabel” says, “Horror addicts like to be scared in a safe, non-harmful way. Creep me out, test my limits, push me over the edge as long as in reality I am safe in my warm bed, able to switch on the light and see the monsters are just in my head.”

Can this predilection be traced to the fight or flight instincts developed over millennia? Susan McCAuley, author of “The Cask,” thinks so. Our world today is relatively safe, she says, and “going to scary movies, reading scary stories, and going on scary rides, helps fulfill a part of us that isn’t being used very often, at least in countries where all our major survival needs are met.”

Her theory may get some support from Donea Lee Weaver, author of “The Ca(t)sualty,” who admits that, for her, the attraction of dark fiction is “the adrenalin rush.” She says she may be covering her eyes, “but I’m still peeking through my fingers, because I just have to know what happens next.”

The stories that Sonora Taylor, author of “Hearts are Just ‘Likes’” says she’s most drawn to aren’t just about a dark force, but how someone’s responding to that darkness” and is possibly unhinged by it. Understandably, the Poe work that inspired her story was “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

My own answer to Tiffany’s question is that “sometimes reading about—exposing oneself to—supremely terrifying things makes it easier to deal with the fearful events encountered in everyday life. Some experts suggest this accounts for the popularity among women of a certain kind of thriller. Reading about sexual violence helps readers contemplate not just the terror of such an event, but also its survivability. Maybe.”

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Raven artwork by rebeccarawrr, creative commons license.

****Quoth the Raven

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drawing, rebeccarawrr, creative commons license

Edgar Allan Poe, king of 19th century mystery and the gothic horror tales, is credited with inventing the modern detective story, wrote stories about inventions, science, and adventure, and, as people may remember him best, was a master of the macabre. The 169th anniversary of his own mysterious death in Baltimore was this month. To mark the occasion, Camden Park Press published a notable anthology of short stories and poems inspired by Poe’s works, reimagined for contemporary times.

Lyn Worthen edited the collection and—beyond amazing—the submissions were due August 30, and the book became available in early October! In her introduction, she says “I believe it is the evocative imagery he paints in sometimes hypnotic lines of pen and ink that have captured our imaginations; the sensations of fear, loathing, grief, and despair that have bound his characters to our souls. . . .those same elements that the authors in Quoth the Raven have so thoroughly captured.”

Just in time for Halloween ordering and reading, here are some of my favorites:

  • “My Love, in Pieces,” by Tiffany Michelle Brown, inspired by Poe’s “Berenice.” The experience of writing it, she says, was “both thrilling and terrifying.”
  • “Marcela,” by Penelope Paling. As in Poe’s “Liegeia,” Marcela is more than happy to continue the tradition of haunting her husband’s subsequent loves.
  • There’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and other diabolical death traps. Then there’s Hugh J. O’Donnell’s “The Montressor Method.”
  • If you’re an ailurophobic with a special horror of black cats, this volume will give you nightmares! Perhaps you should read “The Ca(t)sualty” by Donea Lee Weaver and “The Black, Long-Haired Domestic” by John Kiste in the daytime.
  • And Kenneth C. Goldman’s funny tale, “Get the Door for Me, Will You, Edgar?” about the trials of a high school English teacher. A more horrifying situation would be hard to come by.

My own story in the collection, “Tooth and Nail” also is inspired by “Berenice,” and concerns a young woman’s obsession with her twin brother. She’s developed a bad case of meth mouth and fixates on the blindingly white teeth of her brother’s new fiancée. No good comes of this. The villain of the tale is “the red-haired Wil Griswold,” a name and description inspired by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who bore a grudge against Poe. After Poe’s death, Griswold wrote a scathing biography that started many of the rumors about the author’s depravity, drunkenness, and dissipation—which later scholarship proved to be false.
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