Big-book-of-Poe review.

Last time.

Phew!! Took me a month and a week to chew through it all!

1020 pages!! But, I did it, and here we go!!

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (2015)

Okay, so let's break it down!

(See here for the whole bibliography)

Old favorites-

-Poems

-The Raven

-The Bells

-Annabel Lee

-Eldorado

-Stories

-The Fall Of The House Of Usher

-The Masque of the Red Death

-The Pit And The Pendulum

-The Tell-Tale Heart

-The Black Cat

-The Cask of Amontillado

New favorites-

-Poems

-The City in the Sea

-The Haunted Palace

-The Conqueror Worm

-Dreams

-Introduction

-To —— (the second one)

-Fairy Land (without the dash)

-Alone

-Lenore

-To One in Paradise

-Bridal Ballad

-Dream-Land

-Deep in Earth

-A Dream Within A Dream

-For Annie

-To My Mother 

-Stories

-Morella

-Ligeia

-The Oblong Box

-The Premature Burial

-The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

-Hop Frog

-Berenice

-King Pest

-William Wilson

-The Oval Portrait

-How to Write a Blackwood Article

-Lionizing 

-The Devil in the Belfry 

-The Man That Was Used Up 

-A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

-The Business Man

-Never Bet the Devil Your Head

-The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

-Mesmeric Revelation 

-The Angel of the Odd 

-The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. 

-X-ing a Paragrab 

-Eureka: A Prose Poem

Honorable mentions-

-The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

-The Murders In The Rue Morgue

-The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

-The Purloined Letter

-The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade.

Complicated feelings about-

-Mellonta Tauta

-The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 

Now, for observations on individual items.

"King Pest" is an MTV/Adult Swim animated short begging to be made.

Drunken sailors find a crazy cult in an abandoned house during the time of the black death.

Everyone's described as ugly as a cartoon. It's The Clockwork Orange gang vs the Texas Chainsaw family. It's fucking wild. One of my new favorite things period. 😎👍

"Fight Club" and "The Dark Half" ripped "William Wilson" off like a deli ticket.

"How to Write a Blackwood Article" would pass muster today as an Onion article.

Fuckin' hilarious. Poe even makes fun of himself a bit.

You know those old 80's metal videos where the power of the rocking alters the laws of nature, and terrifies the uptight squares?

"The Devil In The Belfry" is the origin of those. Poe invented the metal video. 😉

I could also weirdly see it as a Wes Anderson movie. But Wes would be on the side of the poor irritated townsfolk. And Bill Murray as a cowboy would be called in to save the day. 😆

"The Man Who was Used Up" I can't describe without spoiling.

Well, fuck it, Poe invented Robocop/Darth Vader. Yeah.

"The Businessman" could be an MTV/Adult Swim cartoon, or a Monty Python skit with humans.

The title character is every libertarian hypocrite you ever argued with online. 

Most literature historians are dead certain Poe was making fun of his shitty stepdad.

I get now why they didn't get along. 😏

"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" is your classic "the inmates take over the asylum" story that the Batman franchise has not only run into the ground, but drilled to goddamned China.

Dunno if Poe invented this sub-genre, but it's a good one. What makes it most notable is one of the doctors escapes out the sewer. "Shawshank" anyone?

Okay, in "Mesmeric Revelation" I don't know if Poe outright invented the force from Star Wars, and the Allspark from Transformers, but if he didn't, he at least gave the mythology of mesmerists and transcendentalists more cohesion as a story than any of them ever did.

You know all the commercials you've seen since childhood up to now where a cartoon mascot starts talking to a human, and they think it's just okay and fine?

"The Angel of the Odd" is the origin. 

Drunk guy gets visited by Kool-Aid Man, except he's wine. 

Wine-Man. But he answers to The Angel of the Odd. Angel tells drunk guy to believe in crazy things, because they can indeed happen. Guy tells Angel to more or less fuck himself.

Angel gives him Three Stooges level bad luck. Like, literally, the remainder of the story turns into Three Stooges.

Tied with "King Pest" for one of the weirdest damned things Poe ever did.

If "Angel" and "King" were done as cartoons, I would keep poking my head in breaking the 4th wall, going "this wasn't exaggerated all all. This actually happens in the fucking story! 😲".

"Eureka: A Prose Poem". It's not a poem. Not one little bit. 

He was covering his ass to try to dodge hurled tomatoes.

It's "Cosmos" season zero.

He rewound Newtonian physics, and figured out the Big-motherfucking-Bang.

He also believed in The Big Crunch. 

The Big Crunch hung on until the 90's and 00's, so....not too shabby for a 19th century guy.

He also figured out the solution to Olber's Paradox which was "why is the night sky dark, instead of lit up by all the stars?".

Every schoolkid now knows, size of the universe, and the limited speed of light.

But someone had to figure that out, and Poe did.

Why doesn't he get credit? Calling this thing a goddamned poem couldn't have helped. 😏

"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" is one of the first, if not the first sci-fi story.

A guy goes to the Moon in a balloon. It's silly, but it's played kind of silly.

Very Baron Munchausen-y.

Jules Verne credited it as the first sci-fi, and that stuck until fairy recently when historians found earlier stories by other guys.

I didn't love it, but it gets honorable mention for is place in history.

"The Murders In The Rue Morgue" "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and "The Purloined Letter" are actually a trilogy of the same detective (C. August Dupin), and I think the only sequels Poe ever did.

Dupin was totally ripped off for Sherlock Holmes. Dupin even smokes a giant fucking pipe. Come on.

Poe totally invented the modern mystery story. No less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle flat out admitted it.

I didn't love them, but again, historically significant.

Okay, only my fellow elder-X-ers will remember, but you know how "Rocky & Bullwinkle" had all these little side cartoons, and one of them was "Fractured Fairy Tales"?

Remember how this guy on old 70's SNL, Mister Mike, would verbally tell these dark bloody versions of Fractured Fairy Tales?

Poe Was Mister Mike before Mister Mike

"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is the first Mister Mike style Fractured Fairy Tale.

I didn't love it, cuz the ending was a bummer, even for my dark jaded self, but I recognized the significance of it, so into "Honorable Mentions" it had to go.

Now, the "complicated feelings" ones....

"Mellonta Tauta" is an interesting little sci-fi story. It's definitely better than "Hans Pfaall".

Poe (as himself) claims he found this message in a bottle, and somehow, it's from the year 2848.

Poe's vision of the future still has us traveling in balloons; just bigger faster ones that we would recognize now as Zeppelins. He has that they're just getting around to putting down the trans-Atlantic telegraph line.

Newspapers are still paper, and have to be dropped off by smaller balloons.

Radio isn't a thing, television isn't a thing, forget internet being a thing.

But the problematic bit is how the narrator/protagonist of the bottle message sneers at Democracy, and is glad it's gone in his time.

This sentiment pops up in a couple other stories, and in one of the essays.

In said essay, he bemoans how we have "an aristocracy of the dollar".

Fair criticism, and it truly culminates in the final ugliness of Trumpism. 

But capitalism and democracy aren't synonyms. 

Capitalism eats democracy unless you keep pounding it down by regulating the fuck out of it. 

Rich assholes that cry about regulation "stifling" and/or "strangling" them are just butt-hurt that they're not proper actual literal royalty. To which I say a hearty "go fuck yourselves".

Anyway!! 

Poe doesn't seem to be arguing for a full-on totalitarian dictator, because he has contempt for them in other stories, but he seems to think we could have a benevolent blood royalty. Like a mix of England with someone like Voltaire as the advisor/vizier.

This is naïve as fuck. He's a 19th century guy, and not enough American history had happened yet, and he's a poet, and poets get dreamy, so I can mostly forgive it.

Mostly. But it's enough to be troubling, and enough that I can't recommend "Mellonta Tauta" with a big toothy grin and a thumbs up.

But, it's still interesting enough to talk about.

And finally, we get to...

"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket".

His one complete novel.

It bombed horribly at the time, and forced him to become a magazine short story guy.

But!! Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and H.P. Lovecraft were fanboys of it.

Melville ripped it off for "Moby Dick"; Lovecraft ripped it off for "In The Mountains Of Madness"; and Verne wrote a direct fan-fiction sequel "An Antarctic Mystery".

 

What makes it problematic so I have complicated feelings?

Racism. 

But...are the racist sentiments Poe's own? There it gets murky.

The protagonist (the titular Pym) comes to an island of black natives, and they butter him up, and then betray him, and he decries that they're the most treacherous wretches to ever grace the Earth.

But!! Before this, in an annotation, Poe tells a side-story of a ship that was lost at sea for a whole year, and finally found, and the crew reported that multiple ships passed by without rendering aid.

White people did that shit.

So, is Poe deliberately making Pym an oblivious hypocrite in making black sins worse than white sins?

Or, is this contradiction even flying over Poe's own head?

The former would make Poe an anti-racist, but being sneaky about it.

The latter...makes him complicated. At minimum.

It's further complicated by Poe hated stories that gave you the moral lesson flat out, like how, say, a Star Trek episode would. He made you have to dig and sift.

Charitably assuming the best, and taking the anti-racist reading, it's an interesting little adventure with horror elements in one graphic scene, and reminded me of old PC adventure games in how the characters mentally problem solved like MacGyver.

Very nerdy. I can see how Verne and Lovecraft dug on it.

But...absent being able to go back in time, and picking Poe's brain, I can't make my coin flip land on the anti-racist reading.

The coin will forever be stuck on its side.

And that's a bummer.

Like "Mellonta Tauta" I can't wholeheartedly recommend it with a grin and a thumb.

I mean, I recommend it, but it'll always be with a "well...but...you see...".

And, speaking of famous Poe fanboys; Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock, and Rod Serling were also in the club.

Albert Einstein was an outspoken fanboy of "Eureka".

And of course, the aforementioned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, and H.P. Lovecraft.

Matheson even wrote the Roger Corman Poe movies.

Matheson's "Somewhere In Time" is totally a mashup of Poe's "Eleonora" and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains".

And I swear, with the exception of one, the stories in "Creepshow" are all Poe rips.

"The Crate "especially is blatantly a mashup of "Rue Morgue" and "The Oblong Box".

And winding the fanboy clock further back; Poe was a Lord Byron fanboy.

His stepdad didn't approve.

I envision the scenes in "Creepshow" where the kid is getting yelled at and slapped for having his Creephow comic, but instead, it's little Poe with his Byron book. 😆

So!! Now!! Let's tackle the elephant in the room I've been avoiding!

He married his 13 year old cousin. 😓😬

I heard this way back in high school English class, so it's not new knowledge.

The book itself can't help but bring it up in both the introduction, and the "about the author".

So, it can't be avoided.

Well....it was the 19th century, and not unusual then. 😓

His own aunt, his future mother-in-law, fixed them up. 😬

Some Poe scholars think they never consummated, that he was what we would now call asexual/ace.

But again, you'd need a time machine to truly decide the matter.

They stayed together until her death at age 24.

If you think he needed to be punished, his grief at her loss, and his early death at 40 would certainly be that.

A complicated figure to put it mildly.

But, rip him out of literature history, literature collapses.

He's seeped into every crack and crevice of every genre.

So, what do you do?

Love him or hate him as a human being, his legacy is literally inescapable, and his stuff bears reading.

And read it I have.

So, what now?

Well, again, there's Jules Verne's "An Antarctic Mystery" to append to the collection.

There's also "A Strange Discovery" by Charles Roman Dake which is also a fan-sequel to "Arthur Gordon Pym".

Aside from a couple short stories, it's the only thing Dake ever wrote. 

But..."Discovery" has stayed in print, and is readily purchasable, so it must have something going for it.

Then, there's 2011's "Pym" by Mat Johnson, which is a "Blazing Saddles" style parody-sequel that tackles the racism head on.

So I definitely wanna see how that goes.

So, yeah, stay tuned for "Antarctic" "Discovery" and "Pym" as my next acquisitions.