Why
Poe?by
Christopher Conlon
© 2019 by Christopher Conlon
What is it about Edgar Allan Poe? A writer
of morbid poems and tales of terror who died 170 years ago, Poe stands today
virtually without equal in the canon of American literature. Only Mark Twain
and perhaps Ernest Hemingway can lay claim to anything like a similar stature
in both critical opinion and popularity—and Poe goes back quite a bit farther
than either. Why should an author who wrote about crazed killers obsessed with
black cats and beating hearts and weird birds who say only “Nevermore” be so
central to our imagination now, in the 21st century? What is it
about Edgar Allan Poe?
In writing my novel Annabel Lee I gave a great deal of thought to Poe’s seeming
immortality, and it seems to me that the answer lies in what I view as the
overarching theme of much of his work: anxiety. Today we can hardly open a
newspaper (or a news webpage) without reading about anxiety—its ever-increasing
presence in our society, its impact on the workforce, its effects on children,
new medications, new approaches to treatment. Sometimes it seems as if the
entire country is wrapped up in kind of free-floating anxiety.
Edgar Allan Poe is America’s greatest
artist of anxiety. We may not personally be obsessed with an old man’s
cataract-covered eye or on getting revenge on an enemy by walling him up in our
basement, but the emotions of Poe’s characters, their giddy feelings of
overwhelming and sometimes inexplicable terror, speak to us with amazing
directness today. The language may be antiquated, but the character’s
subjective experiences of reality feel completely contemporary. I sometimes
wonder if, in some strange way, Poe sensed the world that was coming—vast wars,
genocides, insanely destructive weapons—and sent out his poems and stories to
the future, prophetic messages in bottles for us to find in our own time….
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a
year ago,
In a
kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there
lived whom you may know
By the
name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she
lived with no other thought
Than
to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In
this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love
that was more than love—
I and
my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the
wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted
her and me.
And this was the reason
that, long ago,
In
this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a
cloud, chilling
My
beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn
kinsmen came
And
bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a
sepulchre
In
this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so
happy in Heaven,
Went
envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason
(as all men know,
In
this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out
of the cloud by night,
Chilling
and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was
stronger by far than the love
Of
those who were older than we—
Of
many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels
in Heaven above
Nor
the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my
soul from the soul
Of the
beautiful Annabel Lee;
For the moon never beams,
without bringing me dreams
Of the
beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never
rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the
beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the
night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my
darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her
sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding
sea.
Annabel
Lee:
The
Story of a Woman, Written By Herself
by
Christopher Conlon
Genre:
Historical Gothic
Everybody
knows Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”—but who was she really?
In this haunting and evocative novel, Christopher Conlon (“one of
the preeminent names in contemporary literary horror”—Booklist)
imagines a life for one of literature’s most renowned characters.
Hers is a chronicle even more thrilling, doom-haunted, and tragic
than Poe himself could have conceived, for here Annabel Lee tells her
own story in her own words…for the first time.
Amazon
* Google
* Smashwords
Christopher
Conlon (b. 1962) is best known as the editor of the Bram Stoker
Award-winning anthology "He Is Legend" (Gauntlet/Tor), a
tribute to author Richard Matheson which was reprinted by the Science
Fiction Book Club and in multiple foreign translations. His novel
"Savaging the Dark" was included in Booklist's "Top
Ten: Horror" for 2015 (starred review) and acclaimed by Paste
Magazine both as one of the 21 Best Horror Books of the 21st Century
and as one of the 50 Best Horror Novels of All Time. Two of his
earlier novels, "Midnight on Mourn Street" and "A
Matrix of Angels," were finalists for the Stoker Award, and he
has written numerous collections of stories and poems along with two
full-length stage plays. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Conlon holds
an M.A. in American Literature from the University of Maryland and
lives in the Washington, DC area.
Follow
the tour HERE
for exclusive excerpts, guest posts and a giveaway!
No comments:
Post a Comment