Compiled by multi-award winning editor, Ellen Datlow, this collection commemorates the second centenary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth. It features Poe-inspired tales by some of the finest talents in the field, including Kim Newman, Pat Cadigan, Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, Laird Barron, Suzy McKee Charnas and others. This all-star line-up has several Hugo, Edgar, Tiptree and British Fantasy Award winners.
Poe: New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This anthology's title notwithstanding, the 19 original stories commissioned for it seem largely devoid of the Poe principle. Kim Newman (Illimitable Domain) contributes a gleefully subversive alternate history in which Poe movie adaptations take over American culture; John Langan (Technicolor) offers an incisive deconstruction of Poe's Masque of the Red Death that also functions as a magnificently creepy horror tale; and Delia Sherman (The Red Piano) proffers a horror romance whose villain is clearly modeled on Poe's sound-sensitive Roderick Usher. For the most part, however, readers will have to work toward the explanatory note each author provides at the story's end to see which Poesque resonance he or she intended. Still, Datlow (Inferno) has assembled an all-star lineup and chosen inventive stories whose quality are certainly an extension of Poe's tradition of excellent weird fiction. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Datlow has assembled an all-star lineup and chosen inventive stories whose quality are certainly an extension of Poe's tradition of excellent weird fiction.
--This text refers to the
Kindle Edition
edition.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
I've been an editor for over thirty years, first in book publishing, but mostly editing short stories for OMNI Magazine and webzine, EVENT HORIZON, a webzine, and SCIFICTION, the fiction area of SCIFI.COM. I now edit original and reprint anthologies. Born and bred New Yorker, although I travel a lot.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspired by the Master of Terror,
By
This review is from: Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (Paperback)
Multiple award winning editor Ellen Datlow offers a shuddersome and entertaining tribute to the works of Edgar Allan Poe in this brilliant anthology of Poe-inspired tales composed by some of the foremost writers of horror, dark fantasy and science fiction working today. For each of these nineteen brand new stories, Ms. Datlow put forth a challenge to compose a tale of terror inspired by the tales of the master, Edgar Allan Poe. There is a specific frisson induced by tales written by Poe, a disconcerting recognition of the endless abyss that yawns unseen beneath our feet, a sense of haunted reality that causes an uneasy sense of lingering dread. These nineteen stories capture the spirit of Poe's work in all of its various permutations, beginning with Kim Newman's hilarious "Illimitable Domain" that will delight fans of the various and wonderful B-grade Poe films starring Vincent Price and his bullet-bra-clad leading ladies. The tone turns dark quickly, however, with tales including the persona of Mr. Poe himself as a character, as in E. Catherine Tobler's "Beyond Porch and Portal". Laird Barron presents a gasp-inducing modern Gothic retelling of "The Masque of the Red Death" with "Strappado", Kristine Kathryn Rusch crystallizes "The Murder of Marie Roget" in her modern Manhattan story, ""Flitting Away", and Lucius Shepard goes deep into the dark heart one man's search for matchless splendor in "Kirikh'quru Krokundor". Poe was famous for tales of doppelgangers, and this venerable storytelling device becomes new and terrifying in the hands of Gregory Frost and Nicholas Royle. David Prill takes Gothic and turns it into American Gothic with "The Heaven and Hell of Robert Flud", and Southern writer Sharyn McCrumb and horror writer Glen Hirshberg also take terror into the American countryside. Pat Cadigan builds a horrific City by the Sea in her story, "Truth and Bone", and Steve Rasnic Tem tells a truly spine-rattling tale of quintessentially Poe-esque claustrophobic terror with "Shadows". Each story in this grand tribute anthology is absorbing, entertaining and deeply spooky, which made it difficult for me to pick a favorite. I must say that the story that most induced the heavy, overarching sense of dread I always feel when reading Poe's work was Melanie Tem's magnificent tale of creeping menace, "The Pickers", which insured that I shall never again witness a homeless person rummaging through a dumpster without experiencing a nervous shiver. POE is a breathtaking anthology of brand new cutting-edge dark fantasy and horror that would greatly please Mr. Poe, I'm sure.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another excellent anthology,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (Paperback)
[This review was originally written when I read the book in late 2008. New comments are in brackets.]
Of the two great figures of American horror fiction, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft is far more frequently imitated. Whether inspired by his cosmicist materialist philosophy, his carefully-honed ornate prose, or (most often, alas) his universe of vastly ancient godlike aliens, other writers have been working in Lovecraft's tradition for decades, almost since Lovecraft himself began writing. For whatever reason, Poe, though equally admired, is less often pastiched. And what literary homage to him does exist is more imaginative, less formulaic, than the endlessly spawning volumes of Cthulhuiana. Such imagination is on display in Ellen Datlow's new anthology Poe, which includes nineteen new stories, inspired by Poe's own works, that celebrate the bicentennial of Poe's birth. [Datlow has since edited an anthology of Lovecraft-inspired tales, which is also well worth reading.] As Datlow observes in her introduction, these stories are not pastiche. Poe serves as a point of departure, not a tracing model. As a result, the anthology offers a range of styles and themes comparable to that in a volume with no theme. Apart from the Poe connection, the only common thread is the high quality of the prose and the elegance of each story's narrative construction. Even entries that lack novelty of plot or theme are distinguished by virtually faultless prose, so that it is impossible to entirely dislike them, they read so easily. Such consistency is a major reason Datlow's anthologies so often find their way onto my reading list. Fittingly, the two best stories bookend the anthology. First is Kim Newman's "Illimitable Domain." It's an excellent choice to open Poe, not only for its high quality but also for the signal it sends about the collection's openness to innovation. It's difficult to say too much about the plot of Newman's story without giving the game away, so I'll only observe that Newman puts his obviously substantial knowledge of mid-twentieth century Hollywood to good use in crafting this tale of comic horror. The narrator's voice is a perfect imitation of the fast-talking, hard-edged Hollywood guy of popular imagination, and as events work toward their inevitable conclusion, a touch of Poe is seamlessly introduced, to surprising effect. Like all the best comic horror, this story is simultaneously amusing and unsettling. Melanie Tem's "The Pickers" is a fine example of how a writer can take a familiar Poe work and craft something new. I wouldn't dream of revealing which bit of Poe she begins with, but she surrounds it with a thoroughly modern phenomenon- dumpster picking- to produce a haunting dark fantasy tale about grief and survival. [I wish I had said more about this story, which lingers in the mind wonderfully, but really there's nothing to say except that you should read it.] Datlow notes that she discouraged writers from using Poe as a character in their stories. One can see why: it would be easy to use the author cheaply, especially given the extraordinary mystery surrounding his death. But that mystery is rife with narrative potential, so it's no surprise that Datlow included three selections that riffed on it in different ways. The first, E. Catherine Tobler's "Beyond Porch and Portal," is perhaps the weakest. [I wouldn't say "weakest" anymore; it's only that I happened to enjoy it least.] It offers a take on Poe's imagination that is similar to those offered about many other authors of fantastic fiction in stories written about them. But Tobler's prose suggests the past without being archaic or ostentatious, and the real heart of the story, the female narrator's liberation from a restrictive world into a strange and new one, is brought across in subtle flashes of insight that are more effective than clearer elocution of the theme would be. In some ways the horror story is a conservative form, one in which delicate execution of a familiar theme or conceit is more difficult than sloppy innovation. [Really this applies only to the kind of horror I happen to like, but the point pasically stands.] Consequently many horror stories are frightening but not all that shocking: the inevitability of the climax is often the point. Stories that manage to thrill and surprise achieve special distinction. Such a story is "The Final Act." Gregory Frost's suspense tale concerns an old high school grudge and an act of final revenge- but whose revenge? Only at the very end is it clear who is the victim and who the villain in this tense piece. In "Strappado," Laird Barron offers a trip through an avant-garde art installation, but is this aesthetic experience worth its price? Barron's forte is bringing unusual characters and images into traditional horror scenarios, and he does so effectively: industrial detritus and 21st-century decadence are as evocative as their classical counterparts. Yet the story never quite attains combustion: one reaches the center and finds nothing there. This may well be the point, but if so it is at odds with the story's potential narrative power. Excessive straightforwardness plagues the next story, "The Mountain House" by Sharyn McCrumb. I've said that familiarity is inevitable in horror fiction, but there can be too much of a good thing, and it's all too easy to guess from the first couple pages exactly where "The Mountain House" is going and why it's going there. Still, the prose has the quiet grace that gentle ghost stories reserve, and its evocation of milieu is powerful given its brief duration. Glen Hirshberg, for my money the greatest current writer of ghost stories, specializes (like many ghost story writers) in fictions about the pain and power of memory. "The Pikesville Buffalo," while not ranking among his greatest work, offers an affectionate portrait of two elderly Jewish aunts, who have an unconventional and strangely poignant answer to the protagonist's question, "How do you survive the love you outlive?" Barbara Roden's "The Brink of Eternity" combines elements of several Poe works with real and invented history so delightfully, and manages its three narrative strands so elegantly, it doesn't matter that the story has only the most rudimentary plot and theme. It's a mood piece, but a fairly strong one. Something similar could be said of "The Red Piano" by Delia Sherman, which reverses a particular trope of Poe but is otherwise a standard tale of psychic vampirism. It comes closer to echoing Poe's style than most other entries, but has a readability that his work often lacked; despite its modern setting, there's a pleasing period feel to the proceedings. ["Standard" is such a harsh word; I think of this one more fondly now. It has a lovely nineteenth-century atmosphere despite a modern setting.] M. Rickert always bring something new and wonderful to her short stories, and "Sleeping with Angels" is no exception. It deals with a friendship between two teenage girls, one of them abused, but with a dark twist few writers could envision. As often, the genre elements in Rickert's story are only as prominent as they need to be to add a tinge of the unnatural to the powerful emotions of real life. In "Shadow," Steve Rasnic Tem offers a portrait of generational paranoia. An old videotape offers insight into the frenzied last days of a relative who once lived in the house where the protagonist now dwells, but the protagonist has her own brand of insanity to face. Though somewhat insubstantial, the story makes good use of the way in which the ordinary can become dangerous and strange in the eyes of a paranoid (or a horror writer). [Like his wife's story earlier, this one lingers in the mind.] Pat Cadigan's "Truth and Bone" features a family whose members develop peculiar talents when they reach a certain age. The narrator discovers that she knows exactly how everyone she meets will die-- and tries to prevent an imminent tragedy, with results that will be obvious to anyone who's ever read a story about trying to change the future. Where the story shines is its portrayal of this unconventional but all too human family and the ways in which it copes (and sometimes doesn't cope) with its members' skills. As anyone who has sat through the dogged explanations that drag down the last third of The Ring can tell you, horror sometimes works better without explanations. Nicholas Royle's "The Reunion," by declining to explain the mysterious...echoes that strike a man at his wife's medical school reunion, brings across the protagonist's bewilderment and sense of the uncanny. As in a dream, the answers seem forever within sight but just out of reach in this quietly creepy story. In "The Tell," Kaaron Warren offers the anthology's middle variation on Poe's final days. Yet this story isn't exactly about Poe, but about his legacy of nightmares and the different ways it might be passed on by artists of other sorts. This is another story that lacks straightforwardness and easy narrative flow and is all the better for it. I'm not sure I quite understand it yet, but I know it works. "The Heaven and Hell of Robert Flud" is Poe re-envisioned, by David Prill, in the American Gothic mode, complete with decayed and eeriely silent farmhouse. It's difficult to explain this tale's grim appeal without giving away which Poe inspired it and how, so I'll say only that a traveling salesman finds his way to that rundown farm, with just the kind of outcome you're already hoping for. "Flitting Away" is Kristine Kathryn Rusch's story of a woman who struggles to survive and unlock the secret of a brutal assault. The secret turns out to be quite intentionally uninteresting; I take Rusch's... Read more ›
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary.,
This review is from: Poe (Paperback)
POE is a treasure in nineteen tales. A recent nominee for the 2010 World Fantasty Award for Best Anthology, it is definitely a must buy.
Brendan Moody (below) has a detailed reaction to many of the tales already, but I would only add that this new volume is also a remarkable legacy record. It shows how Edgar Allan Poe's inventiness, experimentation, and relentless explorations into human desire and agony (especially from his fertile writing period of 1827 to 1848) has grasped the living, holding tightly to our current most original writers of the strange. These would include Ms. Datlow's author choices from America, Canada, the UK, Australia, Fiji, and points beyond ... Once raised, some dark inspirations, ideas, voices, reactions, & conflicts never let you go, and that's what we witness in this starry collection of never-seen stories.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
