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Poe Forward News 2005
In 2005, we are redesigning the website with an emphasis on simplifying the navigation.
Congratulations goes to DAVID DELGADO, the co-founder of PoeForward, for graduating Loyola Marymount Law School. In addition to taking the California Bar Exam, David is getting married this summer to JULIE DERCLE, a University Professor and a longtime PoeForward associate.
Congratulations also goes to Brian Aldrich, the other co-founder of PoeForward, for introducing Julie Dercle to David Delgado.
Ain’t love grand?
Summer 2005: Anna Cora Mowatt’s 1845 play FASHION opens at Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon. Essay on Mowatt by Poe Forward Editor and Creative Director Brian Aldrich appears on Theatre site. Poe came to several performances of this play to laugh at a character modeled after himself. He reviewed the play and was friends with the playwright. This play was the SNL of its time as it satirized the celebrity society of the day including the character of a romantic poet who used his verse to woo women – kinda like Poe.Poe Books 2005
An Antarctic Mystery Or, the Sphinx of the Ice Fields:
A Sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
by Jules Verne, Brian Taves, and Cashel Hoey
Hardcover - Dec 30, 2005
Paperback - Nov 9, 2005
Inspired By Edgar Allan Poe by Lance Tait
Paperback - Sep 30, 2005
by Jeffrey Hatcher
Dramatist's Play Service
Paperback - Aug 30, 2005
by Joseph Covino Jr.
Paperback - Aug 16, 2005
Book Description:
Edgar Allan Poe's San Francisco: Terror Tales of the City is a psychological gothic horror suspense thriller perfectly faithful to the style and tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, set in contemporary San Francisco, in which a hypnotist, Dr. Vincent Valdemar, ostensibly undertakes to condition a writer, Nicolino, to copycat the murderous modus operandi of a notorious serial killer, known as the Scarabus Killer, who stalked San Francisco in times past. Fate unites both characters who coincidentally admire the works of Poe, themes and images of which are liberally interspersed throughout this perversely tantalizing terror tale of Poe, of hypnosis--of the City! What's real and unreal becomes eerily blurred in a shadowy and murky fog as this surreal brew weaves its way through an ethereal cityscape populated by spectral characters: in this ultimate Poe-pourri.
Other Books by Joseph Covino Jr.--
Terror Tales of the City: Prince of the Perverse
by Joseph Covino Jr.
Paperback - April 2002
Frankenstein Resurrected
by Joseph Covino Jr.
Paperback - Jan 21, 2005
Book Description:
Frankenstein Resurrected is the first part to an ambitious epic trilogy creatively adapting and combining the characters and scenarios of the celebrated horror classics, Frankenstein and Dracula, preserving the original stories of both perfectly intact without corrupting or distorting either. This initial entry sets the stage for a literally soul-searching retelling of the Frankenstein tale-a provocative saga of ultimate human arrogance and inevitable vengeance as monster challenges his maker-by fleshing out those narrative elements which Mary Shelley only sketched while directly confronting what she carefully skirted: the deeply profound mystery and secret of the human spirit itself.
An Edgar Allan Poe Mystery
by Harold Schechter
Paperback - Jul 26, 2005
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.
by John May
Paperback – June 28, 2005
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.
(Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
by James M. Hutchisson
Hardcover - April 2005
A Novel by Andrew Taylor
Paperback - Mar 9, 2005
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.
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