| Author | Message | ||
     Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 82.6.94.181 |
I'm watching a BBC documentary on Edgar Allan Poe. It is a dark, shadowed and extremely insightful portrait of this complex visionary. Regards Terry | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I just watched this, Terry: excellent. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Just read 'The Gold Bug' for the first time last night and was impressed at how he made an impossible narrative - I mean completely bonkers - all make perfect sense in the end... apart from the nature of the bug itself. What was that all about? | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 212.219.63.204 |
I love Poe, the dark intensity of his work. though oddly, his comic story "A Pair of Spectacles" is my favourite. In fact, I like Poe far more than Lovecraft because Poe's work has a maturity that H P lacks. Not that I don't like Lovecraft...so you can all put the pitchforks and flaming torches away. Cheers Terry I-like-HPL-honest-guv Grimwood | ||
| Steve Bacon (Stevebacon) Username: Stevebacon Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 90.204.111.238 |
There's a Joel Lane story that wonderfully captures Poe's obsession with women - could it be All Beauty Sleeps? Forgive my poor memory. If you haven't read it, I'd urge you to. | ||
| Ian Alexander Martin (Iam) Username: Iam Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 207.6.255.47 |
Personally, the best part about Poe's writing is the way he keeps working in all the Alan Parsons song references! Oodles of cool stuff is carefully seeded through the narrative of his writing, ans he even includes albums from throughout Parsons's career! [whisper whisper] ...Oh. Never mind. | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 212.219.63.204 |
I know what you are talking about Ian, although I never owned "Tales of Mystery and Imagination". cheers Terry | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Read a number of stories over the weekend that don't add anything to Poe's literary legacy but are interesting little oddities, apparently written as spoof articles for the newspapers of the time: 'The Balloon Hoax' - again pre-figuring Verne this tells, in pseudo-scientific detail, of man's, allegedly true, first crossing of the Atlantic by powered balloon airship. As a Fortean, the story chimes perfectly with the Mystery Airship UFO scares that swept across America in the late 19th Century. 'Von Kempelen And His Discovery' - a jokey little piece alleging a reclusive scientist's successful discovery of the philosopher's stone, by transforming lead into the purest gold. He claims this will lead to a crash in the value of gold and urges all his readers to cash in on silver. I wonder if anyone was taken in? 'Mesmeric Revelation' - reads as a fascinating prologue to 'The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar' as this features the same hypnotist's earlier experiment with a sleepwalker. Less a narrative than a philosophical treatise on the nature of reality, and the implications of an infinite universe, the story reveals Poe to be, at that time anyway, a devout believer in some form of unimaginable all-encompassing "God" entity, that consciously divided itself into infinite variations of sentient life throughout the universe, and the reality of an "afterlife" for all those apparent individuals of being subsumed back into the One - great minds think alike.  | ||
| Ian Alexander Martin (Iam) Username: Iam Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 207.6.255.47 |
Terry: There's also "The Gold Bug" on The Turn of a Friendly Card, and quite possibly even more for all I know. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Seven stories in to 'The Complete Tales...' and so far only three of them have worked as memorable narratives; 'Hans Pfaall', 'The Gold Bug' & the timeless but overly anthologised 'M. Valdemar' (I must have about 10 copies in the collection). The other four are interesting but inessential non-narrative oddities that appear written to order for the newspapers. Still another 65 to go, plus the novel and poems though... | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 86.185.1.18 |
'MS Found In A Bottle', 'A Descent Into The Maelstrom', 'The Murders In The Rue Morgue' & 'The Mystery Of Marie Roget'... I may be teaching my granny to suck eggs but these four in a row have lost none of their staggering power, originality or compulsive readability. What really impresses, though, is Poe's effortless mastery of such a wide variety of tales. From haunting supernatural fantasy (that prefigures Hodgson, Lovecraft & Leiber) to battle against the elements adventure to intricate, grand guignol murder mysteries that - as with 'The Gold Bug' - set up a seemingly impossible set of circumstances, that convince the reader Poe has dug too deep a hole for himself to get out of, before he ties it all together with a flourish of genius that will brook no arguments. It's been years since I've read the best of Poe and I'm finding the experience truly humbling - any nagging doubts that he perhaps doesn't deserve his reputation have already evaporated like mist. The image of that razor wielding orang-utan, and what it did to its victims, is still one of the most potent in horror fiction. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.17.252.126 |
I'm thoroughly into the flow of this mammoth collection now. 'The Purloined Letter' bid an entertaining farewell to Auguste Dupin, armchair detective extraordinaire. Then three famous tales of pure horror that couldn't be any different from each other: 'The Black Cat' laid the template for every supernatural revenge from beyond the grave (or is he merely mad) tale that came after. 'The Fall Of The House Of Usher' gave full bloom to his poetic sensibilities and deepest darkest obsessions, with an endlessly fascinating and uniquely reticent fantasy of dark family secrets eating away from within. The most ambiguous tale so far and with more than a hint of Lovecraft about it. And 'The Pit And The Pendulum' went for the jugular with as concise a piece of stark psychological terror as has ever been penned. I see it as a ratcheting up of what he started with 'A Descent Into The Maelstrom' - an attempt to drive home the physical experience of puny mortality helpless in the face of a blind overwhelming destructive force. Another 57 of this quality to come... |