MELLONTA TAUTA; VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY (1849)

Here we have two more of Poe's incredibly detailed hoax-stories, though despite their detail I tend to doubt that they fooled many readers.

MELLONTA TAUTA takes the form of a letter written in 2848, detailing the satirically oriented innovations of the future. It's largely a catalogue of wonders, with no conflict as such.

VON KEMPELEN's discovery is an alchemical device that turns lead into gold. His efforts to profit thereby lead to his being accused of counterfeiting, but Poe seems to lose interest in the fate of Von Kempelen once the author's made his point about the possible devaluation of the prized mineral.

. THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR (1845)

This story, famously adapted to the 1962 film TALES OF TERROR, is little more than a reprise of Poe's MESMERIC REVELATIONS from the previous year, in that again a hypnotist endeavors to place a dying man under a spell, to see what happens to a human mind as it dies. But VALDEMAR is a much more relatable story, and where REVELATIONS confines itself to an uncanny effect-- the body of the dying man hardens like stone after death-- VALDEMAR goes the extra mile and has the subject dissolve into "putrescence."

THE POWER OF WORDS (1845)

Poe never seems to have lost interest in the idea of angelic colloquies, but "Power of Words" is definitely better organized than earlier works like "Eiros and Charmian" and "Monos and Una."

Once again, we have two angels, at least one of whom used to be a human from a now destroyed Earth. The other angel is more "in the know" about the nature of the universe, and relates a somewhat Deist-sounding diatribe about how the angels, acting for the Creator, brought the universe into being through "impulse upon the ether." Poe's descriptions of the angels winging their way through constellations like Orion are impressive despite their brevity, and though Poe was never a philosopher, his attempt to imagine God as an ever-evolving intelligence is a pleasing blasphemy for the time. And for once, the colloquy actually has a climax, as the know-it-all angel comes near a star he personally brought into being, and sees in it the twin sides of his own nature, of both the love of beauty and the horror of psychic turmoil:

"[The star's] brilliant flowers are the dearest o all unfulfilled dreams, and its surging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts."

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 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.

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1842)

Though MASQUE is one of Poe's best known stories, it doesn't offer a lot of surprises. The plot-action resembles a lot of Poe's simple "life gives way to doleful death" tales, but unlike those lesser tales, this one plays on class distinctions, as seen when Prince Prospero-- one of the few Poe characters with a proper name-- tries to give himself and his noble friends sanctuary from the ongoing plague of the Red Death.

One interesting visual effect that I've rarely seen in cinema: that the Red Death, attacked by the nobles, simply collapses into a pile of empty clothes, showing that the being that wore them was nothing but an intangible plague-spirit. 

NEVER BET THE DEVIL YOUR HEAD (1841)

Compared to Poe's early stories about demonic deals, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" is the best of its kind thus far. A foolish young man develops the habit of making ridiculous bets in which he wagers his head to the devil if he loses. Predictably, a strange fellow shows up and tricks the better into performing a stunt that leaves the fellow missing one cranium.

It's never been an overly popular tale, but gained some moxie when it was adapted as one of the stories in 1968's SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.

THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA (1841)

This is, like THE COLLOQUY OF EIROS AND CHARMIAN, a static dialogue between two spirits who discuss the destruction of the world for a while. However, Monos, the male, seems far more interested in describing his experiences of dying, which are not a little reminiscent of the weird alive-but-not-alive symptoms seen in LOSS OF BREATH.

THE COLLOQUY OF EIROS AND CHARMIAN (1939)

The most I can say for "Eiros and Charmian" is that it does seem, like "Silence-- a Fable," to be taking place in a "real" fantasy-world. Eiros and Charmian were once living human beings, and they meet in the afterlife following the destruction of the entire world.

Suffice to say that otherworldy profundities were not Poe's strength.

LITTLE FRENCHMAN..., HOW TO WRITE/BLACKWOOD, DEVIL/BELFRY, MAN WHO WAS USED UP (1837-1838)

As arranged in the Running Press book, the next four Poe tales are all pretty humdrum humor-stories from the author.

"Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" is little more than an excuse for Poe to indulge in dialect-humor, in which a boastful Irishman competes with a "little Frenchman" for a maiden's favor. Even if one didn't know the story's title, Poe telegraphs the story's "surprise" from a mile away.

"How to Write a Blackwood Article" is narrated by "Signora Psyche Zenobia," who gives a snarky account as to how a writer can sell short stories to the popular fiction magazine Blackwood's. In the original publication Poe this supposed instructional essay with one of the Signora's stories, "The Scythe of Time," in which Zenobia herself is beheaded by a giant clock-hand. Unlike the slightly later "Pit and the Pendulum" that contributed to Poe's notoreity, "Scythe" is presented as a tale that did not really take place, so that the paired narratives conform to the naturalistic phenomenality.

"The Devil in the Belfry" is a marvelous story in which a devilish being enters a Dutch community, one obsesses with orderliness, and upsets the citizens by causing a clock to strike thirteen o'clock. The satire probably worked better in 1838.

"The Man Who Was Used Up" is the only story with any substance. An unnamed narrator meets a famed war hero, A.B.C. Smith, at some party. The narrator is immediately fascinated with the man's physical comeliness-- indeed, in modern times readers would assume that the narrator has formed some sort of "man-crush," if not outright homosexual lust. But as the narrator hears strange rumors about Smith, he becomes consumed with curiosity. He finally seeks out Smith at the man's home, only to learn that the great war-hero has lost most of his natural body-parts to duels and battles with Indians. Smith's manservant has to put the "used up" hero together out of false legs, false arms, a false palate, etc. This too I rate as "naturalistic" even though it is certainly an exaggeration of what the prosthetics of the time could produce.

LIGEIA (1838)

In my review of MORELLA, I remarked:

The story has been adapted to the cinema much more often than "Berenice," but to make the narrative work in a film, it's usually dumbed down into a story of a dead mother's spirit possessing the living body of her daughter, which isn't even close to what happens.

I didn't mention that one major reason for this dumbing-down: that cinematic adaptations of "Morella" are almost certainly drawing upon the model of the later "Ligeia," in which possession is nine-tenths of the story. "Morella" is extremely oblique about whether anything supernatural takes place after the unnamed narrator gives his equally nameless daughter the name of his late wife. Poe is philosophically cagey in this story, suggesting only that two entities cannot share the same identity.

In contrast, "Ligeia" is a more outright "ghost story," though still told in a more indirect than most works in the subgenre. In contrast to "Berenice," the narrator can't even remember when he first met the beautiful Ligeia, though as with "Morella," the thing the male character holds most in common with his lady fair is their mutual interest in occult studies. Yet this time Poe devotes a lot more time to discussing the many beautiful features of the mysterious female-- eyes, nose, chin-- and relates the total effect of Ligeia's loveliness to a quote by Francis Bacon that defines beauty in terms of its
"strangeness."

Like both Morella and Berenice, Ligeia sickens and dies. However, like Berenice Ligeia has a conduit that will return her to the mortal world, and it's not anything as earthbound as mere catalepsy. Rather, her knowledge of occult philosophy suggests that she may be able to keep herself-- or maybe her spirit-- alive beyond death, or, as she calls it in her poem-within-the-story, "The Conqueror Worm."

Ligeia's body at least perishes in an unnamed city on the Rhine, after which the narrator-- who has inherited her great wealth-- travels to England and buys a deserted abbey, which he restores to become his new home, as he is taken with the "gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building." Where Poe devotes one long paragraph to descanting on the beauty of Ligeia, the abbey gets four full sections, suggesting that Poe is almost more interested in the tomb than in the womb.

Then, in what sounds very much like an arranged aristocratic marriage, the narrator marries an Englishwoman, Rowena. The two don't get along, and soon Rowena too is stricken by some unnamed illness. She comes near death, but rallies. It may be at this point that Ligeia's spirit-- at least in the more traditional ghost story-- begins to get a new toehold in the mortal world. After much buildup, Ligeia makes her presence known in one of the odder manifestations in horror-fiction, which may be something Poe derived from a secondary source.

 It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle
footfall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second
thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips,
I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if
from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or
four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw
-- not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly, and I
forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after all, I
considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination,
rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and
by the hour.
Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediately
subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the
worse took place in the disorder of my wife; so that, on the third
subsequent night, the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb,
and on the fourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded body, in that
fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride.

And then follows the big climax, in which Rowena's dead body comes to life, taking on the very appearance of Ligeia-- and there the story ends.

It's been suggested that the opium-addled narrator may be just imagining the whole thing. I can't deny that Poe leaves himself this "out." But prior to "Ligeia" the author shows no bashfulness in portraying the "real marvelous" in his tales: he's no Ann Radcliffe, seeking to dispel the fancies of ghosts and demons from spooky tales. I also think the average reader, both in Poe's time and this one, is likely to take the narrator as reliable on this score, given that the recrudescence of Ligeia is a thing about which said narrator is justly ambivalent.

THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM (1837)

Leslie Fiedler cites documents from Poe's surviving letters to support his argument that Poe's only finished novel was an attempt to emulate the success of Fenimore Cooper's adventure-books. PYM was not successful with a majority audience, and Poe only attempted one other novel-length work, the uncompleted JULIUS RODMAN.

PYM is a corker, though. Like many Poe works the main story takes place within a frame, as the main character details the story of his experiences at a later date, though the full story is given a tantalizing, unresolved conclusion.

PYM is closer in spirit to Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND than to anything by Cooper, for the titular character is a feckless young man who goes to sea for adventure. Instead Pym suffers an assortment of terrors and tribulations that look forward to the constant perils of serial films, to say nothing of "torture-porn" flicks. Though Pym himself is barely competent to survive the sea's rigors, he lucks out in making common cause with Dirk Peters, a "half-breed" sailor possesses of Herculean strength. Given the author's love of epicene, scholarly characters, Peters is an unusual creation, and the closest Poe ever came to creating a combative hero. Peters lacks the depth of character found in both Cooper's Hawkeye and his Indian buddy Chingachcook, but he does have an almost Conan-esque moment when he uses a knife to slay a giant polar bear.

The phenomenality of PYM starts out as purely naturalistic, but the novel enters literally metaphenomenal waters when Pym and Peters, lost at sea, are picked up by a ship set to explore the South Pole. The ship's crew meets a strange race of Negroid people near the Pole; people who are so black ("How Black Are They--?") that not even their teeth are white. The savages ruthlessly kill everyone in the ship's crew, though Pym and Peters escape for a while. The Americans finally manage to steal a boat from the evil blacks-- as well as taking one of the tribesmen hostage-- and find themselves sailing into a world that gets stranger and stranger. The novel ends on a bizarre note, as the two Americans behold a titanic white human figure waiting at the Pole to greet them.

The narrative breaks off, and an interpolation by another hand explains that though Pym returned to the U.S. and managed to write his story, he died before completing the work, thus leaving the narrative an eternal mystery. Peters is also supposed to have returned, but remains unavailable to anyone inquiring about the adventure. Later authors were more impressed by Poe's PYM than his contemporaries. Jules Verne wrote a rationalistic sequel explaining in tedious detail what Pym encountered at the South Pole. In contrast, H.P. Lovecraft understood that Poe was seeking to evoke the sense of a mysterious, imponderable cosmos. HPL not only incorporated elements of the Poe work into his own "Cthulhu Mythos," he also made frequent use of the trope of the "story that breaks off at the end and leaves the reader guessing."

SILENCE-- A FABLE (1835)

"Silence" is another prose-poem, less allegorical than "Shadow." The story takes the form of a tale told by a creature known only as "The Demon" to an unnamed listener. The Demon speaks of the sights he beheld in a "dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire," but what he describes seems entirely otherworldly-- a forest, whose trees rock back and forth even though there's no wind, and water-lilies that "sigh" to one another.

A stranger appears in the region, and chooses to sit down upon a large rock. The Demon watches the morose-looking man from hiding, marveling at his godlike appearance, and also notices that for some unvoiced reason the word "DESOLATION" is written into the rock. After the man sits there a while, the Demon takes offense at his unwavering stoicism, and "curses the elements." The man stays where he is despite a great storm, so then the Demon resorts to a "curse of silence." This causes everything, including the sighing lilies, to cease making any sound. The curse also causes the letters in the rock to change so that they read, "SILENCE." The unnamed man on the rock listens for any sounds, finds none, "shudders," and then flees the region, never again to be seen by the Demon.

In the last paragraph, the presumably human narrator reacts by finding the story "most wonderful," even exceeding the tales told by "sybils" and "iron bound volumes of the Magi." However, he can't laugh, as the Demon can, at the predicament of the man in the story. The Demon curses the listener as well, but nothing happens, except that a lynx wanders out of a nearby tomb, lies down at the Demon's feet, and looks up at him-- at which point the story closes.

Since at one point the listener alludes to Allah, it's probable that Poe was seeking to duplicate the effect of certain tales in the Arabian Nights that portray realms of imponderable mystery. In this he succeeds, for even though the strange region is supposedly in Libya, it seems like a wholly unreal place, governed by its own poetic laws. Rather than "horror" or even "proto-science fiction," "Silence" is a story of otherworldly fantasy. It bears a family resemblance to William Beckford's novel VATHEK, which also takes place on Earth but visits weird otherworldly realms.

SHADOW-- A PARABLE (1835)

This is the first Poe story that resembles the notion of the "prose poem," which has no Aristotelian complication as such, and exists only to paint an unusual mood.

The basic scenario looks forward to "The Masque of the Red Death." It's narrated by an individual who styles himself "the Greek Oinos," and when the story opens, Oinos and six unnamed men are seen sitting in a room getting drunk, while Zoilus, a man of their former acquaintance, lies dead of plague. A strange shadow enters the room, and speaks to them:

And the shadow answered, "I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal." And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

This sort of mood-piece, with its emphasis on a "vague and formless" shape, possibly influenced H.P. Lovecraft's conception of his formless terrors, though HPL's terrors weren't usually direct representations of Death.

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE (1833)

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE, though it may have been intended to be something of a burlesque of other "tall tales of the sea," shows Poe finally giving full rein to his daemonic imagination.

The "message" is purportedly one abandoned to the seas in a bottle, written by a man lost at sea. His sailing-vessel is caught up by a titanic storm, and, instead of simply being sunk, the ship is caught up and pulled along by the force of the storm. The narrator and one other man survive the initial torrent, but this already fantastic situation turns wilder when the ship he's on is destroyed by a second, larger ship, also being borne along by the great storm. The other survivor apparently perishes, but the narrator is flung onto the second ship. This ship still has a crew, though all of the sailors are so aged that they don't even apprehend the narrator's presence. Still alone even among these Sargasso-like survivors, the storm finally hurls the whole megilla down into an endless abyss-- though apparently not one so endless that the bottle with the message fails to show up in the mortal world once more.

I frankly didn't know whether or not Poe really believed that such phenomena were possible, or if it was all just a jape. This site, however, suggests that Poe harbored some eccentric beliefs about the structure of the known universe, and that MS. may be based in part upon those beliefs-- so I've decided to label it as "marvelous."

BON-BON: A TALE (1832)

Another comic story involving His Satanic Majesty. The "restauranteur" known as Bon-Bon combines cuisine with philosophy, as the author tells us that "it is to Bon-Bon that Kant himself is mainly indebted for his metaphysics." The Devil comes calling, and the two of them discuss food for the stomach and food for thought. Again, pretty tough sledding for moderns. Bon-Bon may or may not perish at story's end.

LOSS OF BREATH (1832)

The comedy is better sustained this time out. The story's narrator, in the middle of arguing with his wife, suddenly finds that he's no longer able to breathe. He doesn't die of this inconvenience; he just can't speak beyond croaking noises. He keeps his malady secret and flees his home. Through a series of weird coincidences, he's sat on by a fat man, who mistakes him for a corpse because the narrator neither breathes nor speaks. The narrator escapes various predicaments, only to be mistaken for a lookalike criminal. He's hanged by the neck, which doesn't really bother him, after which his immobile body is interred. He does survive all of these experiences in a story that serves as a precursor to "The Premature Burial."

THE DUKE DE L'OMELETTE (1832)

This is a generally silly "devil's bargain" spoof. The titular Duke is bearded in his home by "Baal-Zebub" himself, who wants to claim his soul. The Duke challenges the Devil to a card-game, wins, and avoids his fate. Like many of Poe's other humorous stories of his early period, this one doesn't translate well for current audiences, as it practically trips over itself trying to sound erudite.

METZGERSTEIN (1832)

This early Poe story-- in some ways a precursor to the better known "The  Black Cat"-- is subtitled "A Tale in Imitation of the German," and thus owes some of its elements to the then-current vogue for Germany's stories of horror and Gothicism.

The title is the name of one of two feuding Hungarian royal families. Frederick, the decadent young lord of the Metzgerstein family apparently sets fire to the stables of the rival family, killing many of the horses. To be sure, the reader does not see Frederick do the deed. But after it happens, a mysterious horse, claimed by neither family, shows up on Metzgerstein property. Frederick becomes obsessed with the horse, and commences to ride it. Eventually the horse carries his evil master into a blazing fire, killing him, and onlookers witness the sight of a horse-like apparition in the sky.

The apparition, being seen by people who have no particular reason to think of the horse as some avenging demon, puts the story into the domain of the marvelous.