THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE; SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY (1845)

Here are two more works showing in detail why Poe is not known today as a humorist. The two stories are almost inversions of the same formulaic joke.

In, THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE OF SCHEHEREZADE, Poe informs us that following the triumph of the long-winded storyteller, after she finishes  her thousand-and-first story, she tells one story that goes too far. Scheherezade tells her sultan a rambling story of Sinbad encountering a host of marvels, all of which were based on real phenomena known to Poe's more scientific age, like coral islands and a hot air balloon. The sultan is so insulted by this affront to his credulity that he has Scheherezade executed.

In SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY, a group of Poe-era scholars revive an Egyptian mummy with the curious name of Allamistakeo. The mummy informs the group that he was never subjected to the usual mummification rituals, because he actually fell into a trance brought on by that old Poe standby, catalepsy. Allamistakeo then plays a game of one-upmanship with the scholars, telling them that everything in their modern era was preceded by Egyptian genius. Only at the climax does one of the modern people manage to come up with something the mummy's words can't trump. Clever, maybe, but not funny.

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD. THINGUM BOB, ESQ. (1844)

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD concerns a young fellow who disparages the power of odd coincidences to affect him. Then a weird-looking fellow appears out of nowhere, chastises the man for his anti-coincidence prejudice, and proceeds to make his life miserable until he mends his ways.

No one else in the story ever sees the Angel, rather like the alleged double of WILLIAM WILSON. Poe never raises the possibility that the narrator is only dreaming, but after the man is put through many wild ordeals-- falling out of a burning building, being suspended from a hot-air balloon-- it may not be "coincidence" that he ends up back into his own home-- supposedly completely rebuilt after the fire-- waking up from his experiences.

THINGUM BOB, ESQ is just a Poe-escapade satirizing the world of small literary magazines, and hardly rates as a story at all.

MESMERIC REVELATION (1844)

Mesmerism is merely a means for Poe to unleash another of his Poe's philosophical-discourses-in-tale-form. Over a series of treatments, an unnamed narrator uses mesmerism on an asthma-sufferer named Vankirk. VanKirk goes into a trance and tells the narrator that he's passed into a half-world between life and death. The hypnotized man relates his insights into the commensurate nature of God, the universal mind, and "unparticled matter."

This is clearly Poe trying to reconcile theism with the physics-discoveries of his time. Within the story there's no proof of Vankirk's exegesis, except for one odd aftermath. Vankirk dies, and the narrator observes that in less than a minute the man's body "had all the rigidity of stone." I would term this trope "freakish flesh" in that the reader cannot be sure that it's anything but a physiological effect brought on by the sufferer's unique mental condition.

THE BALLOON-HOAX, A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS(1844)

Once again Poe tries his hand at using his ratiocinative talents to put across a hoax. But whereas "Hans Pfall" at least a few amusing moments, "Balloon-Hoax" is utterly mundane, "fantastic" only in terms that Poe couldn't know exactly what elements would be needed for a balloon-ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Forgettable in almost every way.

A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS, however, is definitely underrated "Marvelous Poe." An unnamed narrator describes his friendship with a fellow named Augustus Bedloe, whose entire body had become rather elongated due to his suffering from neuralgia. Bedloe has been treated for years by a private doctor, Templeton, who is a follower of the doctrines of Mesmer, though mesmerism seems to play no role in the story.

Bedloe disappears from Charlottesville, the city in which he and the narrator reside. When Bedloe shows up at last, he tells a story of having got lost in the neighboring mountain range, the Ragged Mountains. Bedloe tells his friend and his doctor that before going for a walk in the mountains, he had a breakfast of coffee and pain-killing morphine. He then stumbled across a city and took part in an armed conflict before finding himself alone again. Templeton believes that Bedloe experienced a flashback to an earlier life, when a man named Oldeb, an acquaintance of the doctor, died during a riot in Benares, India.  A little later, Bedloe perishes in a manner loosely similar to the fate of Oldeb, whose name is almost exactly the same.

There are strong parallels between this story and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," published in 1816.

THE OVAL PORTRAIT (1842)

This is another of Poe's peculiar bifurcated tales. It starts out with an unnamed narrator, who, for undisclosed reasons, is traveling with one servant in the Appenines Mountains. The man has had an unexplained "affray with the banditti," which has left him with a painful but apparently not dangerous wound. The duo take refuge in an uninhabited chateau, whose owners never show up, and while the narrator is taking opium for his pain, he becomes interested in the "oval portrait" of a beautiful young woman.

He becomes so taken with the portrait that he digs through a convenient family history to find out who she was. In a touch reminiscent of Hawthorne, it's revealed that when the woman had her portrait painted by her beloved, he made it so lifelike that the life departed from the body of the model.

Nothing overtly fantastic takes place, but the narrative qualifies as uncanny because the pay-off is communicated through the venue of the internal story, which may or may not be a true representation of events.  The story doesn't even bother coming back to the narrator's concerns once the history of the doomed woman is told. The story was adapted into a godawful ghost-story flick, reviewed here.

ELEONORA-- A FABLE (1841)

This story uses a similar approach to ISLAND OF THE FAY-- published in the same year-- in which the glories of bounteous nature give way to doleful death, ELEONORA is far more successful, in part because Poe includes one of his favorite themes: that of a beloved wife-- the narrator's cousin, once again-- who passes away early. Her passing coincides so nearly with the decline of the natural forest where she and the narrator lived that nature seems in sympathy with her spirit. Hence this one rates as "uncanny."

An odd development is that prior to the cousin's death, the narrator swears never to look at another woman. Time passes, and he re-marries, but nothing happens except that he dreams that the spirit of Eleonora forgives him his transgression. An interesting combination of motifs from both MORELLA and LIGEIA.

THE ISLAND OF THE FAY (1841)

This is an entirely naturalistic rumination. Poe's narrator observes an island in a stream, and imagines a faery creature pass from life to death as it rounds the island's light side and encounters its dark side. This opposition between innocence and death was better served in the more poetic SHADOW-- A PARABLE.

WILLIAM WILSON (1839)

I don't have much to say about WILLIAM WILSON. I've heard it said that it belongs to the subgenre called "the doppelganger story," which was apparently popular in this time-period.

Since there's no independent verification that the narrator really does have a lookalike who dogs his tracks and ends up dying at the narrator's hands, this seems more of "phantasmal figuration" than an outright marvel.