nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre
Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles
Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing
July 1, 2015
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
As a newly transferred junior in college, I worked as a student assistant in a Survey of American Literature course. After hearing the professor outline the readings for the semester, I approached him and asked whether the students would be reading Poe—not coincidentally, I had just finished my first go-through of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and was eager to find out more about him and his stories.
No, I was told. The class would focus on writers for a more refined palate. Interest in Poe among students should have waned by the time they were sophomores in high school. No, there would not be time for a writer such as Poe.
In his defense, the professor was a deeply-read scholar in the period I had chosen as my emphasis—The English Renaissance. He became my advisor, my mentor, and my friend. And, back in the distant days of the mid-1960s, Stephen King and others had not yet re-imagined dark fantasy, transforming a minor sub-sub-genre (if even acknowledged as that) into a vehicle of relevance and versatility, so the slight might perhaps be forgiven.
Later, I found graduate professors more amenable to Poe and began discovering what a powerful voice he had been in American literature. Far from being merely a scribbler of sensational stories and sappy verses, he is arguably one of the greatest nineteenth-century influences on modern fiction. He invented the detective story before the word detective appeared in English. He helped formulate the modern short story, not only directly but indirectly, through French symbolists who imitated him and were in turn imitated by early twentieth-century writers. He helped establish the critical vocabulary for discussing modern literature. He helped change the rhythms and directions of verse. He was a capable editor and an extraordinary hoaxter.
Kilpatrick and Soles’ Nevermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre demonstrates how pervasive, how extensive, how profound Poe’s influence is among modern writers of supernatural and weird fiction. Twenty-odd stories based on a single nineteenth-century writer might be expected to explore similar paths, exploit similar vocabularies and narrative structures, and, in the least successful cases, sound distressingly the same.
With Poe, however, there is always something new to be investigated, whether it be his physical landscapes (often as important as his characters), his psychological insights into abnormal states, his studies of obsession and madness, or his emphases on love and loss, grief and sorrow, self-destructiveness and death. And there is even room for a bit of a hoax now and then.
When these possibilities are coupled with such accomplished writers as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Christopher Rice, Lisa Morton, Nancy Holder, Richard Christian Matheson, William F. Nolan and Jason and Sunni Brock, Tanith Lee, Margaret Atwood, David Morrell and a dozen other estimable talents, the results display the remarkable talents of all involved…including Edgar Allan Poe.
The collection begins with landscape: Yarbro’s “The Gold Bug Conundrum” pits a treasure hunter in a decrepit house, seeking the still-hidden secret to Poe’s tale, and the forces of nature that oppose him. Barbara Fradkin’s “The Lighthouse” neatly blends isolation, loneliness, fear, and a hint of the supernatural set in a world fraught with war and death.
Kelly Armstrong’s “The Orange Cat” concentrates on obsessive characters—human and feline; while Margaret Atwood’s “The Eye of Heaven” constructs a fantasia of terror around a single, superficially innocuous image.
Richard Christian Matheson’s “133” raises the art of Poesque retribution and revenge to chilling levels. At the opposite extreme, Thomas S. Roche’s “The Masques of Amanda Llado” shows that even within Poe’s framework of terror and horror there is the possible of humor, no matter how macabre.
The final segment, David Morrell’s “The Opium-Eater,” seems to break with the protocols of the collection—it is set in pre-Poe England and includes Thomas de Quincey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others in a story of a series of seemingly unrelated, horrific deaths. The point is that, just as Poe influenced generations, so he was influenced. The complex web of cause and effect; the injuries, willful or unknowing, inflicted by characters upon others; the power of grief and loss in distorting survivors’ lives; the ennobling and disabling power of love—all point directly to elements integral in Poe’s best stories.
Nevermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre performs an excellent service in warranting Poe’s modern reputation as a master of letters and a continuing resource for ideas, images, and emotions.
