nEvermore! Tales of Murder Mystery and the Macabre: (Neo-Gothic fiction inspired by the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe)

  nEvermore!

  Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre

  edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles

  Copyright © 2015

  All individual contributions copyright by their respective authors

  E-Book Edition

  Published by

  EDGE Science Fiction and

  Fantasy Publishing

  An Imprint of

  HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  CALGARY

  Notice

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author(s).

  * * * * *

  This book is also available in print

  * * * * *

  Dedication

  This work is dedicated to the master dream-weaver! Thank you, Mr. Poe, for the thrills and chills.

  And to Tanith Lee who, like Poe, deserves to be remembered.

  All that we see or seem

  is but a dream within a dream.

  — from A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

  * * * * *

  Introduction

  It’s been nearly 170 years since his death, yet his name is legend, and recognized world-wide. His short fiction and poetry is still read by just about every school child in the world, and aficionados of his work peruse his essays and letters. Well over 70 films and scores of TV shows or series have been directly or indirectly inspired by his work, and there have been a significant number of theatrical presentations, musical pieces and artwork inspired by the writer. All this from Edgar Allan Poe, a man who lived and died with a broken heart.

  It would be an understatement to say that Poe’s oeuvre was created while enduring the well-known tragedies of his life, a life saturated with loss, poverty and betrayal. His troubles were many and his fortunes few. He was the first American writer to try to earn a living from writing, and one of the earliest American writers of short fiction. Fame shrouded him upon his death, leaving him immortal. It is a testament to the human spirit that Poe wrote through his sad existence to bequeath to us some of the most memorable and touching fiction and poetry that has ever been written.

  Edgar Allan Poe is often identified by the Gothic-style of his supernatural fiction. He is also famous as the inventor of the modern detective story. His influence spans centuries and he inspired the grandparents of genres as disparate as romance and science fiction. He wrote from the heart and soul and his fears, worries and intellect are evident throughout what his quill translated from his genius mind to paper.

  We would be lesser human beings without his cherished stories and poems and for this reason we, the co-editors of nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre, wanted to compile an anthology to honor him.

  To that end, we invited well-known authors to spin for us Poe-like tales. Write us a mystery with supernatural leanings, like Poe did, we said. Write a supernatural story with the hint of a mystery, just as Poe constructed, we asked them. We invited writers of all stripes to pen an original Poe-like story, or to use an existing Poe story or poem as a jumping-off point. Within are original tales that possess a Poe-esque quality, and, as well, riffs on familiar Poe stories and poems, taking his fiction as a direct inspiration. Have a read and investigate what our amazing writers have created when inspired by: The Black Cat; Annabel Lee; The Gold Bug; The Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Lighthouse; The Raven; Berenice; The Masque of the Red Death. We begin with an enlightening essay: A Rather Scholarly View of Edgar Allan Poe, Genre-Crosser!

  We hope you enjoy nEvermore! We certainly enjoyed compiling this special and unusual anthology. It has been our delight and our privilege to immerse ourselves in Poe’s legacy and to celebrate this author who gave so much to so many.

  — Nancy Kilpatrick, Montreal 2015

  — Caro Soles, Toronto 2015

  * * * * *

  A Rather Scholarly View of Edgar Allan Poe, Genre Crosser

  by Uwe Sommerlad

  Edgar Allan Poe did not write genres; it was his idea that a collection of stories would show a great variety, and that — read together — they would in some way complement one another.

  On the 1845 Poe story collection “Tales”, selected not by Poe but by Evert A. Duyckinck, the author complained to a correspondent, “He… has accordingly made up the book mostly of analytic stories. But this is not representing my mind in its various phases— it is not giving me fair play. In writing these Tales one by one, at long intervals, I have kept the book-unity always in mind— that is, each has been composed with reference to its effect as part of a whole. In this view, one of my chief aims has been the widest diversity of subject, thought, and especially tone and manner of handling.”

  The horrific worked quite well with the laughter to Poe, obviously, and his first collection of stories, “Tales of the Folio Club” — had it ever seen the light of day — was intended to be framed in a grotesque satirical setting, making fun of literary critique and the publishing business. Yet it contained stories like the dyed in the wool horror tale “Metzengerstein”. He had already toyed with the idea to call his stories Arabesques then. The collection Poe himself had edited in 1840, which was only moderately successful, he titled “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”, a description he probably had distilled from an essay Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1827 for the Foreign Quarterly Review about the “sickliness” of E. T. A Hoffmann’s stories and novels, and the German taste for the supernatural Gothic tale in general, as opposed to “the virtuous and manly” which Scott idealized in his medieval romances.

  Poe, although it is uncertain whether or not he read E.T.A. Hoffmann, was rather smitten with the subversiveness of the sickly, it seems. Still, he felt he had to defend himself against charges of bad taste and the ‘Germanism’ in his writing. And not only in his correspondence (he wrote to one publisher, “But whether the articles of which I speak are, or are not in bad taste is little to the purpose. To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.”) Also, in his preface to “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”, he assures his readers, while addressing his critics, that he is able to write better stories than those presented in the collection: “Let us admit, for the moment, that the ‘phantasy-pieces’ now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is ‘the vein’ for the time being. Tomorrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. These many pieces are yet one book. My friends would be quite as wise in taxing an astronomer with too much astronomy, or an ethical author with treating too largely of morals. But the truth is that, with a single exception, there is no one of these stories in which the scholar should recognize the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call Germanic, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German literature have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul— that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, an
d urged it only to its legitimate results.”

  Those who think it necessary to defend Poe against the accusation that he was a writer of horror stories like to point out that only a part of his output can actually be counted as Contes Cruels, and very few are actually supernatural tales. Yet many of his satires have supernatural elements, his philosophical writings tend to be metaphysical, and his adventurous and ‘analytical’ stories often make use of the grotesque and the gruesome. Take the closed-room mystery “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, the first of Poe’s three tales about the amateur detective Auguste Dupin. While it has all the elements of what Poe called an analytic story, it also is one of his most grotesque and cruel tales, in which it turns out that the horrible murders were actually committed by an ape on the loose.

  Madness is, of course, one recurring theme in Poe’s work, as is revenge; the first an expression of his belief that ‘terror is not of Germany, but of the soul’, the second probably stemming from his own subconscious and the treatment he had received during his lifetime— from his foster father, from critics, from publishers and from other writers. Often Poe makes the reader an accomplice, by having the madman and/or murderer as the storyteller. Poe called the driving force, the impulse to commit murder and other atrocities ‘the imp of the perverse’ (also the title of one of his tales), and some of the most famous stories by him fall into that category: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, “The Cask of Amontillado”. None of them is supernatural, although the first two contain every element of a ghost story, where the villain is haunted by his own guilt, leading to his downfall. The difference is that there are no ghosts evident, only the bad conscience of the murderer. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a supernatural tale, describing the descent of a degenerated, probably incestuous family into madness and demise.

  Some amount of madness and definitely a huge portion of psychology also play a large role in Poe’s work dealing with the loss of a beloved, namely “Morella” (the closest to a vampire story in his oeuvre), “Ligeia”, “Eleonore” and “Berenice” (and quite a few of his poems, namely “The Raven”). The first three concern the possibilities of reincarnation, the last one is a Conte Cruel about the fear of premature burial, which is another recurring theme in Poe’s stories. Poe himself had lost his mother when he was two, his foster mother Frances Allan when he was twenty, and finally his wife Virginia when he was thirty-eight— probably the only three people he was ever really devoted to, apart from his aunt Maria Clemm, who survived him and lived for another twenty-seven years, mainly because of the generosity of Poe’s friends, admirers and colleagues, including Charles Dickens and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  In the adventurous sea yarn “MS Found in A Bottle” — a warm-up for Poe’s only novel, A Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — the supernatural appears in the shape of a ghost ship. Although the hair of the protagonist in Poe’s second sea story, “A Descent into the Maelström” turns white because of the terror he faces, he saves his skin by analytical evaluation of his situation. Another adventure story, “The Gold-Bug”, first describes a treasure hunt but then delves into the analytic when a secret message has to be deciphered.

  Poe, especially in his early writings, was much influenced by Lord Byron’s doomed heroes and probably by E.T.A. Hoffmann, who made use of the doppelganger theme, later utilized to great effect in Poe’s “William Wilson”. One of Poe’s tales, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, obviously took its inspiration from the similarly-themed “The Iron Shroud” published twelve years earlier by William Mudford. Poe makes the fundamental idea completely his own, though, and gives it a fresh spin.

  * * * * *

  The reception of Poe during his lifetime was mixed. He never made a larger sum out of his writing than the $100.00 he won in a Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper writing contest in 1843 with his “The Gold-Bug”. Despite the huge popularity of this story, and of his 1845 poem “The Raven”, his books did not sell well, and his larger fame lay more within his work as a fearless, strident, often acerbic critic than as a poet or a writer of fiction.

  In a rather strange turn, he made the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold his literary executor. Griswold, a mediocre writer more than once criticized by Poe, quickly took revenge on his ‘tormentor’ by publishing first an obituary (signed as Ludwig), which was initially printed in the New York Tribune and then re-printed in newspapers and magazines around North America. It began: “Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was known, personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars.”

  Whatever was written after this much lengthier biographical obituary and the notoriously-inaccurate “Memoir of the Author” biography, also by Griswold, published the year after Poe’s death (in the third of the four-volume “The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe” Griswold edited, now known as “The Griswold Edition”), nothing could change the public’s perception of Poe. But Griswold, who had poisoned the water for about a century, still throws a long shadow. He painted Poe as arrogant, irascible, unfriendly, envious, selfish, vulgar, a cynic, a Godless man and a miser, and worse: “…there seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and… little or nothing of the true point of honour”. Even Griswold didn’t deny Poe’s genius. He did deny him, though, the human qualities to deserve it. Those writers coming to Poe’s aid could not undo the damage of Griswold’s opprobrious, hypocritical writing. One commented that Griswold obviously misunderstood the meaning of ‘literary executor’ by taking an axe to Poe.

  Although Poe was heavily damaged by Griswold — who even rewrote passages in a few of Poe’s letters to put himself in a better light and to stain Poe even more — his work survived unharmed. It’s hard to think of a history of literature without including Edgar Allan Poe. While he was inspired by few, he, in turn, influenced almost every field of writing that came after him— another sign that his writing wasn’t received only as ‘genre literature’.

  Mark Twain’s satires, for example, owe quite a bit to those of Poe, one — “The Invalid’s Story” — being a parody of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström”. There are more than just traces of “William Wilson” in “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” and a good dose of “The Gold-Bug” in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. Alan Gribben points out that “A Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” obviously impressed Twain immensely, and that its influence can be traced in both “Life on the Mississippi”, and his masterpiece “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Supposedly Twain, who once quipped about Poe that “to me his prose is unreadable” always kept Poe’s prose in his pocket when he was young.

  Another great American novel, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”, also is much influenced by “Pym”, as well as by “MS. Found in a Bottle”.

  Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce — also walking in the footsteps of Poe — made his own explorations into the macabre, which led to him being compared to Poe all the time, despite the fact that Bierce developed a much more cynical view on the world than his predecessor — who was fundamentally a moral writer, despite everything Griswold said about him — ever had. Like every writer of Contes Cruels, including Poe, Bierce was stigmatized as ‘morbid’.

  This sometimes called an unhealthy influence of Poe was not limited to America. Charles Baudelaire, who during his lifetime also struggled with poverty, idolized Poe and translated him into French. From the fertile soil of Poe’s imagination grew Baudelaire’s own “Les Fleurs du Mal”, which in turn made a huge impression on Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Baudelaire now is described as an important representative of literary surrealism— another strange fruit
from Poe’s roots.

  Probably France’s greatest admirer of Poe — at least the most commercially successful — was Jules Verne. The ‘analytical’ Poe, his interest in the scientific beliefs of his time and their probable development and outcome as well as his fascination with the forces of nature, inspired Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires. The airship from Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax” and “Mellonta Tauta”, the moon flight from his “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” grew roots in Verne’s work, making Robur the Conqueror a king of the skies and the Baltimore Gun Club explorers of space. Again, A Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket set high sails. The cannibalization of a shipmate in Verne’s 1875 “Le Chancellor: Journal du passager J. R. Kazallon” owes a debt to Poe’s only novel, and “Le Sphinx des glaces”, published in 1897, is a straight sequel to Pym. And his grotesque short stories mirror the satires of Poe. Verne went on to inspire not only many writers — like Ray Bradbury — but also explorers and scientists, from Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen to German-American aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, becoming not the inventor of the so-called science fiction novel, but regarded as its godfather.

  In Britain, the writers who were influenced by the power of Poe make quite an impressive line-up. Robert Louis Stevenson— would Treasure Island have been written without “The Gold-Bug”? Is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde imaginable without Poe’s explorations into the human mind? Stevenson loathed Poe the man, but admired his literary skills as well as his “important contribution to morbid psychology”.

  The early tales of Herbert George Wells show the footprints of his predecessor; experts in English literature point out connections to Poe’s work in the short story “The Star” and in the novels Days of the Comet and The Island of Dr. Moreau.