Given the number of times I had to read it during my high school and college career, I’m guessing “The Fall of the House of Usher” would make their list. Perhaps it’s due to the scholarly overexposure, but I must vehemently disagree. I’ve always been one to trumpet about the lesser-known works of a given literary guru in place of the so-called classics (FRANNY AND ZOOEY over CATCHER IN THE RYE, THE ILIAD over THE ODYSSEY, “A Hunger Artist” over “Metamorphosis”, the sonnets over the plays). Any textbook will tell you to read “The Pit and
I
the Pendulum”. I’m here to champion the words you might have missed but remain just as vital. So rather than attempting a list of “essentials”, I’ve decided to expound upon five pieces that strive to encompass Poe’s versatility as a writer. The man has, after all, influenced everyone from
Tim Burton to Terry Pratchett, and such a diverse legacy requires an equally diverse body of work. I must begin with a study of Poe’s strengths by exhibiting
his rather obvious penchant for atmosphere—a talent picked up not-so-subtlely by authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce. No story of Poe’s is a better example of foreboding atmosphere than “The Masque of Red Death”—a story which, it might be argued, consists almost entirely of atmosphere save for the final few paragraphs. An overproud prince creates an artificial barrier against natural disease, and in celebration of doing so successfully (or so he thinks), throws a masquerade ball seven rooms
deep. The images reign, here: discolored stained glass, velvet tapestries, candelabras, the chiming of a grandfather clock—all of these are classic Poe, and they create the kind of setting that a personification of the horrific disease may enter without throwing the story into an obnoxious metaphorical vacuum. Given Poe’s reputation for the macabre, the
desolate, and the inhumanely horrifying, the droll tale “Angel of the Odd” might seem like an anomaly among his pages. But please, don’t miss it. It sets itself up to be a classic tale of “woe” until the inebriated main character reads about one of the many singular human interest items in the newspaper and proceeds to hallucinate a creature with beer kegs for legs, bottles for arms, and a nearly indecipherable vocal affectation. The series of “natural accidents” that occur over the next several pages are meant to school the protagonist in his own skepticism, and they involve everything from raisins to hot air balloons. The humor, you’ll soon discover, is not only ingenious,
’ve had much contention with my English professors about what constitutes a ‘Best Of’ Edgar Allan Poe.
but unmistakably referential to Poe’s own somber reputation. He’s making fun of himself. As an example of Poe-etic verse (sorry, Forry made me do
it), I shall forego “The Raven”, which is not so much a piece of literature anymore as a pop culture staple and a frequent target of parody. Allow me to introduce, instead, “The City in the Sea”: a relatively obscure piece with sound structure, appropriately tragic narrative, and themes somewhat reminiscent of classics like “Annabel Lee”: “Resignedly beneath the sky / The melancholy waters lie. / So blend the turrets and shadows there / That all seem pendulous in air. / While from a proud tower in the town / Death looks gigantically down.” The poem stays true to the motifs that Poe has always explored most reverently—that life, in the traditional sense, crumbles before dream-states and death—and it does so in a perfect subtlety not found in other examples of Poe’s usually heavy-handed verse. Now I must expound upon the point of language, which I am
always wont to do given my near-unhealthy obsession with the medium of words. “Berenice”, a short story renowned (of course) for its utter creepiness, is also an uncanny force of cadence and sentence structure. The narrator, an outsider apparently prone to long meditations of an uneasy length, uses his disease to describe his situation in a way that could be sung with a four-string accompaniment: “In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning—among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday—and in the silence of my library at night—she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her—not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze, not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.” Cue the symphony. A couple of fermatas, too.
Finally, I feel compelled to mention that story which I first read
at age fifteen and subsequently cause me to never looked at short stories the same way again—the story that convinced me, in fact, that short fiction was a superior form of literature: “The Cask of Amontillado”. Everything about this story is wrong. The hero is the villain; the denouement is the climax; the twist is not so much a surprise of plot as a shock of your own loyalties as a reader. The evil lurking here is unparalleled, and yet, there are no ghosts—no supernatural harbingers of doom. Just the loathing and conviction of one common man. His is a soul wrenched from all possible pathos, and the terror lies in the discovery that you are rooting for his terrible act instead of condemning it. The monster may as well be the wickedness in your own self. For who hasn’t internally cheered at the chilling dialogue highlighting Fortunato’s useless, echoing pleas? “‘For the love of God, Montressor!’ “‘Yes,’ I said, ‘for the love of God!’”
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FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • MAR/APR 2012
FORGOTTEN LORE
A Selection by
Holly Interlandi
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