Tales of Mystery & Imagination
by Edgar Allan Poe
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This is my year of horrible reading. I am
reading the classics of horror fiction during the
course of 2016, and each week will write about
a significant work in the genre. You are invited
to join me in my annus horribilis. During the
course of the year—if we survive—we will
have tackled zombies, serial killers, ghosts,
demons, vampires, and monsters of all
denominations. Check back each week for a
new title...but remember to bring along garlic,
silver bullets and a protective amulet. T.G.
Essay by Ted Gioia



Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to essays on each work)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Aldiss, Brian
Barefoot in the Head
Aldiss, Brian
Hothouse
Aldiss, Brian
Report on Probability A
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
Amado, Jorge
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Asimov, Isaac
The Foundation Trilogy
Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
Banks, Iain M.
The State of the Art
Ballard, J.G.
The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballard, J.G.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Ballard, J.G.
The Drowned World
Barth, John
Giles Goat-Boy
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
Blish, James
A Case of Conscience
Borges, Jorge Luis
Ficciones
Bradbury, Ray
Dandelion Wine
Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
The Illustrated Man
Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles
Bradbury, Ray
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Brockmeier, Kevin
The View from the Seventh Layer
Bulgakov, Mikhail
The Master and Margarita
Bunch, David R.
Moderan
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
Carpentier, Alejo
The Kingdom of This World
Carroll, Lewis
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Chabon, Michael
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End
Clarke, Arthur C.
A Fall of Moondust
Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Susanna
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Crowley, John
Little, Big
Danielewski, Mark Z.
The Fifty Year Sword
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Davies, Robertson
Fifth Business
Delany, Samuel R.
Babel-17
Delany, Samuel R.
Dhalgren
Delany, Samuel R.
The Einstein Intersection
Delany, Samuel R.
Nova
Dick, Philip K.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Dick, Philip K.
VALIS
Disch, Thomas M.
Camp Concentration
Disch, Thomas M.
The Genocides
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Donoso, José
The Obscene Bird of Night
Ellison, Harlan (editor)
Dangerous Visions
Ellison, Harlan
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
Esquivel, Laura
Like Water for Chocolate
Farmer, Philip José
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Fowles, John
A Maggot
Fuentes, Carlos
Aura
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gaiman, Neil
Neverwhere
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Greene, Graham
The End of the Affair
Grossman, Lev
The Magicians
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
Harrison, M. John
The Centauri Device
Harrison, M. John
Light
Heinlein, Robert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert:
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love
Helprin, Mark
Winter's Tale
Herbert, Frank
Dune
Hoffman, Alice
Practical Magic
Houellebecq, Michel
Submission
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Jackson, Shirley
The Haunting of Hill House
Keret, Etgar
Suddenly, A Knock at the Door
Keyes, Daniel
Flowers for Algernon
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kunzru, Hari
Gods Without Men
Lafferty, R.A.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Dispossessed
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Leiber, Fritz
The Big Time
Leiber, Fritz
Conjure Wife
Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry
Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer
Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris
Lethem, Jonathan
The Fortress of Solitude
Lewis, C. S.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Link, Kelly
Magic for Beginners
Malzberg, Barry N.
Herovit's World
Mandel, Emily St. John
Station Eleven
Mann, Thomas
Doctor Faustus
Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude
Markson, David
Wittgenstein's Mistress
Matheson, Richard
Hell House
Matheson, Richard
What Dreams May Come
McCarthy, Cormac
The Road
Miéville, China
Perdido Street Station
Miller, Jr., Walter M.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Millhauser, Steven
Dangerous Laughter
Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas
Moorcock, Michael
Behold the Man
Moorcock, Michael
The Final Programme
Morrison, Toni
Beloved
Murakami, Haruki
1Q84
Murakami, Haruki
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the
End of the World
Nabokov, Vladimir
Ada, or Ardor
Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niven, Larry
Ringworld
Noon, Jeff
Vurt
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
O'Brien, Flann
At Swim-Two-Birds
Okri, Ben
The Famished Road
Percy, Walker
Love in the Ruins
Poe, Edgar Allan
Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Pohl, Frederik
Gateway
Pratchett, Terry
The Color of Magic
Pynchon, Thomas
Gravity's Rainbow
Rabelais, François
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Robinson, Kim Stanley
Red Mars
Rowling, J.K.
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Rushdie, Salman
Midnight's Children
Russ, Joanna
The Female Man
Saramago, José
Blindness
Sheckley, Robert
Dimension of Miracles
Sheckley, Robert
Mindswap
Sheckley, Robert
Store of the Worlds
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Silverberg, Robert
The World Inside
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Spinrad, Norman
Bug Jack Barron
Stoker, Bram
Dracula
Stross, Charles
Glasshouse
Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human
Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels
Thomas, D.M.
The White Hotel
Tiptree, Jr., James
Warm Worlds and Otherwise
Tolkien, J.R.R.
The Hobbit
Updike, John
The Witches of Eastwick
Van Vogt, A.E.
The Mixed Men
Van Vogt, A.E.
Slan
Van Vogt, A.E.
The Voyage of the Space Beagle
Van Vogt, A.E.
The World of Null A
Vance, Jack
Emphyrio
Verne, Jules
Around the Moon
Verne, Jules
From the Earth to the Moon
Verne, Jules:
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Vonnegut, Kurt
Cat's Cradle
Vonnegut, Kurt
The Sirens of Titan
Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wallace, David Foster
Infinite Jest
Walpole, Horace
Hieroglyphic Tales
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Wilson, Robert Anton & Robert Shea
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Winton, Tim
Cloudstreet
Woolf, Virginia
Orlando
Zabor, Rafi
The Bear Comes Home
Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light
Zelazny, Roger
This Immortal
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
My Year of Horrible Reading
When Science Fiction Grew Up
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
The Year of Magical Reading
Remembering Fritz Leiber
A Tribute to Richard Matheson
Samuel Delany's 70th birthday
The Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut
The Most Secretive Sci-Fi Author
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
A.E, van Vogt Tribute
The Puzzling Case of Robert Sheckley
The Avant-Garde Sci-Fi of Brian Aldiss
Science Fiction 1958-1975: A Reading List
Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
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SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Millions
Big Dumb Object
SF Novelists
More Words, Deeper Hole
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction
Tor blog
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My Year of Horrible Reading
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How influential is Edgar Allan Poe? Let’s look at the numbers. The mystery or
detective story, a category virtually invented by Poe, represents 10% of fiction
book sales in the current day. The horror genre, in which Poe sets the standard
for all later writers, accounts for another 3-4%. The suspense or thriller story,
another specialty of this author, generates around 15% of current-day fiction
sales. Poe also dabbled in science fiction, comedy and other categories, but
you hardly need to consider his efforts in those areas in order to conclude that
he exerted a greater influence on modern storytelling than any other author in
history.
But are you ready for Poe the postmodernist? Can you
make room for him in the pantheon of avant-garde
innovators? Yes, the careful student of his writings finds,
again and again, extravagant literary devices that few
others adopted until the second half of the 20th century.
For example, did Poe invent the unreliable narrator?
Consider, as evidence in his favor, the opening to his
story “The Black Cat”:
For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I
am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.
Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where
my very senses reject their own evidence….
This is standard fare for Poe. In the opening paragraph
of "The Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator admits that listeners
think he is insane. At the start of "The Pit and the
Pendulum" he declares that his senses are leaving him.
Again and again we encounter this opening gambit. Did
anyone before Poe populate stories with narrators who insist
with such vehemence, in advance of the tale, that they simply can’t be believed?
Indeed, we encounter other postmodern elements in
Poe’s writing. Note, for example, his deliberate blurring
of the line between fiction and non-fiction. In “The Premature Burial,” he even
insists at the outset that his story is only worth telling because it is scrupulously
true—and he actually sticks with fact-based reportage for the first half of his tale,
although this is merely a ruse to lure the reader deeper into the deception. In
"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," he even boasts that he solved a real-life murder
case with the deductions made by his fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin—a greatly
exaggerated claim, but presented persuasively in the context of the story.
Poe was so good at this kind of manipulation of textual expectations that
many readers actually thought that his tale "The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar"—in my opinion, the most gruesome Poe story, almost repulsive in
its particulars—was a trustworthy account of an actual incident.
The most basic expectations are thwarted again and again by this author. One of the
most time-honored rules of horror fiction is to start with an appearance of normalcy
and conventionality—if only so that the terrors ahead will have all the more shock
value. Even the lowliest director of the most tawdry slasher film understands the
importance of doing this. But Poe will have none of it. His narrators (and almost
every one of his masterpieces is told by a first-person narrator) typically launch their
testimonies with grand declarations in the opening paragraph. They tell us that they
are falling into lunacy, or seeking extreme revenge, or that the reader can hardly
expect to believe the dark and eerie things that have happened to them. Poe is so
fixated on setting an extreme mood for his tales that he dispenses with the slow and
gradual build-up and instead immediately thrusts us into the manias and deliriums
of his protagonists.
Poe maintains his intensity of vision even in passages where we might expect
formulaic prose. Consider the opening sentences of "Ligeia" where Poe’s narrator
describes the facial features of his beloved—a passage that, in the hands of another
writer, would take up a few phrases with the familiar modifiers and metaphors. Not
so with Mister Poe. Instead he launches into a feverish and obsessed disquisition on
the limits of the memory and aesthetics as it grapples with the ineffable qualities of
an effulgent countenance. The description lingers much longer than we expect,
eventually stretching out for almost one thousand words. Before the expostulation is
finished, the reader is repulsed by its neurotic quality. This perhaps enhances the
effect of the story, but we still might wonder at Poe’s willingness to destroy the
symmetry of his tale by focusing so much on the symmetry of his heroine’s visage.
But at the story’s conclusion, when the narrator recognizes these same features, but
now transplanted to the face of his dead second wife Lady Rowena, the reader feels
the horror amplified—and only because of the elaborate care Poe had lavished on the
appearance of Ligeia at the outset. Compare how other, lesser authors handle stories
of the resurrected dead—usually with all the subtlety of a Hollywood zombie film—
and marvel at the means by which Poe achieves a much grander effect. Here the key
to the entire story resides in the skill with which Poe can depict a woman’s face in
prose—the very passages that most genre authors would fill with clichés.
Poe is equally unconventional in his construction of detective stories. Even the most
basic requirements of the genre are flagrantly violated. But who can blame the
author who essentially invented the genre for imposing his own rules? Even so, what
could be more basic than the expectation that the murder be committed by a
murderer? Yet in his debut mystery, “The Murders in Rue Morgue,” Poe refuses to
accept even this obvious stricture.
We have had more than 150 years to assimilate Poe, but it’s still bloody hard to treat
him as part of the literary mainstream. Too many strange ingredients show up in
these stories…and I’m not just talking about the phantasmagoria of the plots. For
example, at the mid-point in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe inserts a poem—a
strange choice for a short story writer, signaling a rupture in the narrative, but one
that this author resorted to in other tales. The poem in question, entitled "The
Haunted Palace," is ostensibly about a stately residence that has been taken over by
some strange power, marked by "vast forms, that move fantastically to a discordant
melody" and a "hideous throng" that rushes out the door, but never seems to have
left the premises.
What could this possibly mean? When Poe had previously submitted this poem to a
literary magazine, the editor rejected it, claiming that he found it incomprehensible.
Most scholars today interpret the poem as an allegory of the collapse of person’s
mind and personality—a view supported by the many comparisons in the text
between the palace and a human head. In the context of the short story, the poem is
sung by Roderick Usher, who is undergoing precisely this kind of collapse. This is
one of the most evocative moments in Poe’s oeuvre, but few authors today would
dare emulate its discords and arcane misdirection. Instead of abandoning a poem
few readers could hope to understand, he puts it in a story!
Note that this interpretation of "The Haunted Palace" could be applied, with more
than a little justice, to most of Poe’s tales. Again and again in his work, the author
obsesses over setting and scenery, and in almost every instance, these details
represent a kind of externalization of the psychological malaise embedded in the
narratives. Few nineteenth century writers were more sensitive to mental states than
Poe, and this is true even when he seems to be describing a landscape, or a building,
or even a raven perched upon a pallid bust of Pallas just above his chamber door. His
plots can be outlandish, the particulars so beyond the conventional bounds of
realism that the mind rebels at the required 'suspension of disbelief'. But Poe
remains convincing nonetheless, and almost entirely because of the extraordinary
conviction of his narrators. They are committed entirely—and sometimes ought to be
committed legally—and this intensity of vision draws us in to the depths of the story,
even when our rational mind rebels.
How strange, nonetheless, that this author of genius should have set in motion the
world of American genre fiction—the most despised segment of the literary
marketplace. Yet perhaps here, above all, does Poe prove his prescience. We are now
living through a golden age in which literary fiction is borrowing heavily from genre
concepts. A host of highbrow literary stars—Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie,
Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem and many, many
others—have come to realize that horror, sci-fi, fantasy and suspense plots can serve
as springboards for masterpieces. And with that leap of imagination and embracing
of mystery they have finally caught up with Poe’s extraordinary Tales of Mystery &
Imagination.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The
Hidden History, is published by Oxford University Press.
Publication Date: January 18, 2016
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