Poe

“Weird Dominions of the Infinite”

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Penumbra – No. 1 has several interesting critical articles I was tempted to review. One argued for the influence of William Hope Hodson’s The Ghost Pirates on Jean Ray’s “Le Psautier de Mayence.” However, since I have’t read that work by Ray, there’s probably no insight I can offer.

I have, though, read my Poe.

Review: “’Weird Dominions of the Infinite’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Scientific Gothic”, Sorina Higgins, 2020. 

Cover by George Cotronis

This is an interesting, insightful, and largely convincing look at two Poe stories Higgins argues should be read together: “Mesmeric Revelation” from August 1844 and “The Facts of M. Valdemar’s Case” from December 1845. The latter story was retitled as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and slightly revised – three sentences were added to the ending – when it was republished. 

“Revelation” is presented as a philosophical dialogue with the hynotized Vankirk presenting revelations from beyond the veil of death since, at story’s end, he is revealed to have died. “Valdemar” has a very similar plot, depicted in more gruesome terms, with the final revelation that hypnotism has kept decay of Valdemar’s body at bay. 

The dialogue in “Revelation” is about “the nature of matter, spirit, soul, and God” with the final revelation that there is no such thing as spirit, only matter. Higgins claims that the story

postulates a monism whereby mind is God at rest, thought is God in motion, and death is ‘the ultimate life’. 

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Finding Poe

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I’m not sure why I have this novel apart from the Poe reference. It’s not on my list of titles I got review copies of nor do I remember buying it.

Still, last October, in honor of the month of Edgar Poe’s death, I read it.

Review: Finding Poe: A Tale of Inspiration and Horror, Leigh M. Lane, 2012.

The blurbs call this a gothic. And, indeed, it is. We have a woman in danger, our protagonist Karina Brantley, and we have a sinister structure, a lighthouse.

But that’s just the start. Karina Brantley isn’t some innocent governess nor unmarried. Her increasingly mad husband, always called by just his surname, was a nobleman back in England and she was a Lady – that is until Brantley murdered a servant trying to blackmail him and walled him up alive. Karina is complicit in that crime.

Brantley takes them to a miserable lighthouse off the coast of New England and seems obsessed by it, taking its measurements and counting the number of its bricks. He becomes increasingly abusive.

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“Some Words with a Mummy”

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It’s a welcome return to Poe this week over at LibraryThing’s Deep Ones.

Review: “Some Words with a Mummy”, Edgar Allan Poe, 1845.

The plot on this one is pretty straightforward, and it’s less weird fiction than sort of American proto-science fiction as well as being a satire. A mummy is revived and discusses Ancient Egypt and nineteenth century America with the narrator and three other men.

So, with some help from Stephen Peithman’s annotations, let’s look at this one.

Poe’s humor doesn’t always work here. Jokes tend not to age well in literature. After all, many modern Shakespeare productions omit some of his humor which, if you’re reading it, often has to be footnoted to get the joke. A joke explained is no longer a joke. Still, the story does have its funny moments.

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Journey to the Core of Creation; or, Adventures in Reviewer Parallax

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Review: Journey to the Core of Creation: A Romance of Evolution, Brian Stableford, 2011.

For one of Stableford’s August Dupin stories, the plot here is fairly simple. As the title suggests, there is also a lot more scientific speculation in this story than others in the series. But, as usual in these books, Stableford hangs multiple meanings on his title. Here it is not only the evolution of life as a whole but that of a single human.

Fittingly, we get some back stories on our main characters.

Our narrator, unnamed thus far in the series, is Samuel Reynolds. Hardcore Edgar Allan Poe buffs will recognize the name as part of Poe’s delirious utterings as he lay dying. At novel’s end, Reynolds makes an interesting statement: he wishes he wouldn’t have made notes on the whole experience. He really doesn’t like being reminded of it. As with “The Legacy of Erich Zann” and, to a lesser extent, The Quintessence of August, Reynolds seems to have a protective amnesia about his experiences.

And Dupin’s early life is also revealed.

It’s the spring of 1847, and political tensions are high in France.

Dupin and Lucien Groix, the head of Paris’s police and another frequent series character, hung about the salon of Achille Maret when they were young. They were both in love with the beautiful, teasing, manipulative Julie, Maret’s daughter.

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The Cthulhu Encryption; or Adventures in Reviewer Parallax

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Review: The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy, Brian Stableford, 2011.

Another complicated installment in the August Dupin series. In fact, it is probably the most complicated of them all.

And that’s appropriate given the theme of encryption. Like the concept of the bibliomania in The Mad Trist and the egregore in The Quintessence of August, Stableford explores multiple meanings of a word, sometimes through non-humorous puns.

Encryption isn’t just something your computer does when you’re buying a copy of, say, a Stableford novel online. It also means to bury, to embed and conceal information in another form, and, if you’re a Pythagorean philosopher, everything you perceive is the encryption of an ultimate reality.

Here encryptions take the form of mysterious tattoos and coins, chants of South Sea Islanders, the legends of the sunken city Lys, the Breton version of the King Arthur story, fairy lore, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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The Quintessence of August; or, Adventures in Reviewer Parallax

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Review: The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession, Brian Stableford, 2011.

While Stableford’s Auguste Dupin stories are mostly independent of each other, it actually helps to have read the first one, “The Legacy of Erich Zann”, before this one to understand it fully.

Well, maybe not. I’m not sure I understood everything about it after one complete reading and another skimming.

But, then, even our unnamed narrator has to consult his journal from three years earlier to link things.

Unlike a lot of Stableford’s forays into weird fiction (at least the ones I’ve read by this prolific author), there isn’t a purely scientific element here.

The story concerns itself with music and the concept of the egregore.

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The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

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Low Res Scan: The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Brian Stableford, 2010, 2012.

In this “Introduction”, Stableford says a couple of things about his recent burst of writing in the Cthulhu Mythos. “The Legacy of Erich Zann” was written to fill out a collection that had it and Stableford’s short novel The Womb of Time. He liked the result so much he undertook to write a series of stories with Auguste Dupin which include elements of the Cthulhu Mythos and “an even vaster metaphysical system” of which the Mythos is a small part. 

Stableford disputes the idea that the Cthulhu Mythos, in its true philosophical form and with its cosmic horror, has really been popularized. He makes the interesting observation that cosmic horror is defiantly esoteric, that it isn’t as easy to evoke horror in that sort of story unlike one with serial killers or ghosts. Cosmic horror requires more imaginative effort on the part of the reader. It is more abstract. It appreciates the vast space and time surrounding life in the universe.  He says cosmic horror plays,

sometimes delicately and cleverly, but always with a reserve of sheer brutality, with our inability to deal with the fact mentally, and our perverse insistence that, even if it is so, it is irrelevant. 

The strength of the Mythos for a writer of cosmic horror is that it has a ready-made vocabulary of symbols. Like writers of mainstream fiction who don’t have to invent a world for their stories, Lovecraft’s Mythos provides a sort of pre-fab set of places and ideas that can be used and are quickly recognized by readers. It can be more useful for a writer than trying to invent a more elegant mythology from scratch for cosmic horror. Interestingly, he sees Nyarlathotep as the most basic figure in the Mythos which may be why he used him for “The Legacy of Erich Zann”. 

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The Mad Trist; or, Adventures in Reviewer Parallax

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Sally Startup, on her Brian Stableford blog, provides the parallax on this one.

Review: The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania, Brian Stableford, 2010. 

The third installment in Stableford’s August Dupin series is indeed about bibliomania, the enchantment of print, its ability to put voices in our heads and suggests thing. It’s about a lot of other things too: esoteric and feminist works by Elizabethans and the possible identity of their authors, curses and cursed books, witches, medieval romance, sibling rivalry and sexual awakening, the evolution of literature, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

As Dupin, who doesn’t appear in most of this story, says, “Nothing is ever simple . . . Not, at least, when it is subject to proper rational analysis”.

As with all the installments in this series, Stableford has worked to make each one self-contained. You can start anywhere in it except with the last book. (Yes, I’ve read them all and plan to review all of them.)

Our story opens with our still unnamed narrator off to visit his friend in England, Richard Carstairs.

Before he boards the ferry, Comte St. Germain shows up to give him a book. He wants it given to Dupin when the narrator returns to Paris. It’s a peace offering by St. Germain after the events of the preceding book in the series, Valdemar’s Daughter.

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Valdemar’s Daughter; or, Adventures in Reviewer Parallax

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No, I have no clue, six months later, why I started Brian Stableford’s Auguste Dupin series with the second installment.

Review; Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism, Brian Stableford, 2010. 

Auguste Dupin, of course, was created by Edgar Allan Poe and used in three stories. And, as you would expect from the title, there is a tie-in to Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”.

The conceit of the series, narrated by an American friend of Edgar Allan Poe living in Paris, is that some Poe stories were based on fact but their supernatural aspects added by Poe. Thus, there really was a Valdemar who was hypnotized at the point of death. 

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The Black Throne

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This one was read last October. I always try to make time for some Poe in October. I’m not quite that far behind my reviews, but this one got overlooked, so it’s a bit of a backtrack.

Review: The Black Throne, Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen, 1990.

Cover by David B. Mattingly

This novel is a farrago of the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe and involves multiple worlds.

We open with Annie on the shore of a fog shrouded sea. She meets two identical looking boys:  Edgar Perry (Poe’s name when he was a sergeant in the US Army) and Edgar Allan (that would have been Poe’s name if he had been formerly adopted by his step family). They go out into the sea to look at a body. Edgar Allan is near it when he loses contact with this dream world but not before he hears the call of “E-tekeli-li” (from Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). Next, we see Edgar Perry near Fort Moultrie (where Poe served and site of his story “The Gold Bug”). Perry sees Annie riding by in a coach. He has long seen Annie in his dreams. Annie, from the coach, seems to telepathically ask for him to rescue her, that she is being taken away to be done harm, and she is possibly drugged. Annie is, of course, the woman from Poe’s “Annabel Lee”.

And so, in the first chapter, we set the tone for what will be a story that works in many of the elements of Poe’s life and his works – some obscure, some obvious. (I’ll admit I recognized most of them, but, for a few, I had to resort to Dawn B. Sova’s Edgar Allan Poe A to Z to refresh my memory.)

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