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POE NEWS & BOOKS 2004
Poe Forward News 2004
Poe Books 2004
Poe Forward News 2004
Early in 2004, we updated the style of the table of contents page and included a 3 panel gif consisting of 3 portraits of Poe from various periods of his life.
Dead Girls: Dead Pool 2003 was updated and 2004 was begun.
By mid-spring, we again redesigned the table of contents page. The poetry corner interviews between Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Marlowe were published.
In the fall, we began editing our Robert Bloch and Stuart Gordon interviews and built up the Poe Forward events section.
By the end of the year, we’ve learned that Louis Marlowe will be delivering to us ACT FOUR in his poetry series “XTIAN LOVE: Liars and Phonies; Gossips and Hypocrites” in 2005. (Exhibit closed.)
Poe Books 2004
Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle
(Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)
by Eliza Richards
Hardcover - Dec 27, 2004
by Harold Schechter
Hardcover - Aug 3, 2004
Book Description:
Suspense, intrigue, atmosphere, and vivid historical detail combine into a thrilling ride through nineteenth-century New York City in The Mask of Red Death. Harold Schechter delivers both a wonderfully accurate portrait of a city in turmoil and an irresistibly appealing depiction of his amateur sleuth Edgar Allan Poe, mirroring the master’s writing style with wit and acumen.
It is the sweltering summer of 1845, and the thriving metropolis has fallen victim to a creature of the most inhuman depravity. Found days apart, two girls have been brutally murdered, their throats slashed, viciously scalped, and–most shocking of all–missing their livers. Edgar Allan Poe, despite what the tenor of his own tales of terror might suggest about his constitution, is just as shaken and revolted by these horrendous crimes as the panic-stricken public. Suspicion of the scalper’s identity immediately swirls around the most famous “redskin” in New York, Chief Wolf Bear, one of the human attractions at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. Certain that Chief Wolf Bear is innocent, Poe has deduced that the city is concealing a cannibal somewhere in its teeming masses, one with an ever-growing appetite for human prey.
Before he can investigate his theory further, Poe stumbles onto the scene of a third gruesome murder. Poe recently met William Wyatt when he agreed to look at a document for Wyatt to determine the authenticity of the purportedly famous handwriting on it. Now Poe finds Wyatt in a pool of blood, his scalp removed. How, Poe muses, are Wyatt and his document connected to the two slain girls?
As frenzied emotions over the murders reach a fevered pitch, Kit Carson makes an appearance. The famous scout has been tracking the “Liver Eater” since the man killed his wife months ago. Together, Carson and Poe make an odd sleuthing team, but their combined wits are formidable. The trail they uncover reveals a dark secret more powerful than anything they could have imagined– one that may reach the upper echelons of politics and privilege.
The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle
(Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
by Lawrence Frank
Hardcover - April 12, 2004
A Novel by Andrew Taylor
Hardcover - Mar 3, 2004
From Publishers Weekly:
The prolific Taylor (the Roth trilogy, etc.) successfully channels Wilkie Collins in his latest effort, crafting a fluid, atmospheric period thriller. Thomas Shield is a young schoolmaster in Stoke Newington, just outside of London, whose charges include 10-year-old Edgar Allan Poe (as a child, the poet spent five years in England) and a pampered banker's son. The school's routine is disrupted when Shield runs across an eccentric character who displays an unhealthy interest in the two boys. His intervention brings Shield into closer contact with the banker's family and two desirable women. Uncomfortably occupying an uncertain position between master and servant, Shield juggles his instincts for self-preservation with his passions, a task made much harder when the severely mutilated corpse of the banker is discovered shortly after his business collapses. While the murder appears to give Shield a clear path to court the attractive widow, he is unable to ignore clues suggesting that the body is actually someone else's. The enigmatic nature of the protagonist a principled but often passive figure distances him from the reader. Although Taylor does an excellent job in portraying early 19th-century London and writes in a clear, consistent period style, the numerous foreboding references suggest a dramatic psychological twist or a surprising revelation concerning the killer's identity that does not materialize. The use of Poe as a character borders on gratuitous, despite the author's incorporation of biographical details; the youth is peripheral to the plot, and a fictional character could have been substituted with little discernible effect. While this effort is not as successful as Charles Palliser's superb, intricately plotted 19th-century thriller The Quincunx, it is a pleasurable read that will engross many.
Unmasking Dual Diagnosis
by Richard A., M.D. Morin
Paperback - Feb 2004
Poe & Fanny
by John May
Hardcover - Jan 4, 2004
From Booklist:
Beautiful, smart, and vivacious, Fanny is a poet and a darling of mid-nineteenth-century New York's gossipy elite. Separated from her painter husband, she falls for the mercurial, hard-drinking, impoverished genius Edgar Allan Poe, whose poem "The Raven" is the talk of the town. First-time novelist May's enchanting protagonist is a fictionalized version of the real-life Frances S. Osgood, once an enormously popular but now forgotten poet. Hints in the historical record inspired May to imagine a scandalous affair between Osgood and Poe and to deftly illuminate the rigid mores of a time in which women removing their bonnets in the theater was news. In fact, much of May's many-faceted and suspenseful love story plays out in the pages of the rival literary magazines in which Poe struggles to earn a meager living. May's dramatization of Poe's epic battles with his demons, his young wife's succumbing to tuberculosis, and bold Fanny's determined resolution of an impossible predicament is at once meticulous and haunting as he sets personal heartbreaks against the greater conflicts of class inequities, slavery, and institutionalized misogyny. Compulsively readable, May's ingenious and sensitive historical novel is impeccably literary and unabashedly romantic.
The Legacy of Delight and Terror
(Filmmakers Series)
by Dennis R. Perry
Hardcover - Jan 2004