Thirteen Reasons I love Edgar Allen Poe (Edgar Allan Poe in general)

Member Name: edie

Product:	Edgar Allan Poe in general
Date:	27/06/01 (527 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Crazy, Creepy, Cool

Disadvantages: None!

1. I have a limited attention span. I love his stories, as none of them are very long or outstay their welcome.

2. Henry James felt that liking Poe was a sign of an adolescent mind: "a mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection" Fair enough- I have a Gothic, romantic imagination that's unsatisfied by realistic fiction. These stories with their nervous, unhinged heroes/villains, beautiful doomed heroines whose names are all something like Morella, creepy black cats, mysterious diseases, crumbling English mansions and masked venetian balls, definitely give me all the immaturity fix I need.

3. None of his stories are that properly Scary. This makes them possible to read without causing insomnia, which is why I prefer to Poe to Stephen King. Or as Lisa Simpson but it in a Simpson's Halloween special after reading The Raven- "maybe people were more easily scared in the 1840s."

4. Poe's style has such a lush, dreamlike quality that I find very addictive. He was so talented at (in English literature class speak) using metaphors to create mood and atmosphere. Poe would be much more acclaimed as a gifted writer, if he'd written "proper" fiction rather than staying with his critically scorned subject matter.

5. His writing is always in print and very cheap to buy. There are so many different paperback editions available all with the classic stories like Pit and The Pendulum and Fall of the House of Usher. My favourite collection is Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which is a bargain with over 500 pages for only £3.99.

6. Poe is a massively influential writer, most of his stories are of the Mystery/ Imagination variety as the book indicates. But he was skilled in a variety of genres from science fiction, essays, poems and detective stories. Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget are seminal detective stories and with their irritating, know-it-all sleuth
are clear forerunners of Sherlock Holmes.

7. In some ways Poe is a very modern writer, quite ahead of his time. His stories, written from the point of view of deranged, murderous narrators, owe more to the recent crime genre than to straight horror. Years before Freud he seemed to have a real handle of psychology, writing about the "disintegration of the self" as much as the supernatural.

8. And if you are of a sceptical, realistic mind it allows you to rationally interpret the strange, unexplainable elements as the delusions of his unhinged characters.

9. Poe wasn't faking it: he had a mad, strange life to match his work. He was orphaned at 2, getting expelled from west point, addicted to opium, did a Jerry Lee Lewis (married his 13 year old cousin, not played the piano) and died mysteriously of either alcohol poisoning or hypothermia at the age of 40.

10. All his stories are better than the cheap Roger Corman film adaptations from the 60s, almost all of which have Vincent Price doing nasty things to a young Jack Nicholson.

11. The vast amount of stories he wrote allows me to skip any I don't like. You can always find a new favourite. My current one is A Cask of Amontilado- an unashamedly psychotic piece where our hero tempts his enemy down to his wine cellar to see the eponymous wine and walls him up alive in there. (As described in his essay Premature Burial, being buried alive in one form or another was a massive fear of Poe's, occurring in most of his stories. Although it was not an unfounded fear in the 19th century, doctors not being all that perceptive about rigour mortis apparently.)

12. Now that they been reclaimed by time and published by Penguin Classics, liking Poe is no longer a guilty pleasure.

13. And it gives me something different to read on the tube other than Harry Potter.

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