My reactions to reading this collection in 2005.

This is an indispensable collection of Poe's short fiction, and Peithman's annotations are actually useful.

I will discuss only those stories having a fantastic element.

“Introduction”, Stephen Peithman -- A pretty good introduction to Poe's life and the critical reaction around him. Of course some revere him. Others see him as lacking substance, particularly "no human interest" (critic W. C. Brownell's words) which is false on the face of it. Poe obviously has a lot of human interest given his keen interest in depicting aberrant states of human psychology and perception. What Poe lacks is modern mainstream literature's obsession with particular characters. Poe's interest, as befitting a proto-sf writer, is in characters as types and representatives of man in general. Peithman quotes a bunch of famous writers and critics on Poe. Peithman does note Poe's keen interest in women but seeming lack of sexual desire. He may not have consummated his marriage to his thirteen year old cousin. In his last month of life, he became a temperance man. Of course, his death is shrouded in mystery. Peithman speculates that occasional hoaxster Poe deliberately chose Rufus Griswold as his literary executor knowing that Girswold's deliberate besmirchment of his reputation would keep his name and reputation alive.

“Metzengerstein” -- Peithman's introduction says this is the tale of Poe that is closest to the German Gothic tradition. He also notes the presence of the theme of transmigrating souls in several of Poe's other works besides here. Peithman helpfully notes Poe's inspirations and source materials as well as cinematic adaptations of the story.

“Ms. Found in a Bottle” -- Peithman notes that the cosmological ideas here were more fully developed in Poe's "Eureka". Evidently the character of the captain is not only a version of the Flying Dutchman but possibly a partial inspiration for Herman Melville's Captain Ahab. As the ship heads to what Peithman says is a South Pole similar to that predicted by Captain John Cleves Symmes and featured in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the protagonist finds a befuddled crew and captain voyaging in a strange world with useless instruments and books.

“Berenice” -- H. P. Lovecraft dismissed one of his most famous and loved stories, "The Outsider", as being a Poe imitation. The beginning of this story, with its narrator growing up without his parents in the large "mansion of my fathers" certainly has the flavor of the beginning of Lovecraft's story "The Outsider".

"Ligeia" -- This story just may have influenced H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing of the Doorstep" since both feature possibly forced psychic dislocation. Here it is Ligeia who may take over the body of the narrator's second wife. I say possibly because, as Peithman points out, many of Poe's seem carefully constructed to provide two explanations: real supernatural events or aberrant perceptions.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" -- Peithman shows a refreshingly broad knowledge of literature. Not only are his annotations here full of references to mainstream literature, but he also mentions Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft (though he does not mention Lovecraft's comments on this story in his Supernatural Horror in Literature -- supposedly, according to S. T. Joshi, comments that were original in Poe criticism). I don't quite buy the notion that Usher and the narrator can be seen as fragments of the same personality though an interpretation of the narrator having his perceptions influenced by Usher is credible. A point against regarding Usher and his sister as elements of the same personality is that Usher is acutely sensitive to sensation and his twin sister is the opposite, cataleptic. Peithman, in his annotations, also doesn't mention an obvious point of the story: if Usher is so acutely concerned with his sister and possesses such keen senses, why doesn't he try to rescue his sister? Very odd and certainly suggestive of repressed murderous desires without the need for the silly Freudian criticism Peithman notes.

"William Wilson" -- I'm not sure all the details of this story support the notion that Wilson's doppelganger is all in his head. His doppelganger, after all, inflicts wounds on his body for one thing. However, I think a case can be made for Poe wanting to suggest a naturalistic explanation. Wilson seeing his doppelganger in the mirror at story's end was almost certainly the inspiration for the end of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider".

"A Descent Into the Maelström" -- This story had an inspiration on sf, most directly in the end of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Peithman makes the good point that, in this story and "The Pit and the Pendulum", the narrators escape by paying close attention to the details of their circumscribed worlds of odd and lethal physical features. That is certainly a feature of some problem-solving sf tales of the Campbellian tradition.

"The Masque of the Red Death" -- Peithman makes the observation that the tone of this story may have inspired the middle portion of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider". It is a strange tale, another example of a protagonist cutting themselves off from the world, here Prince Prospero in his castle as he tries to outlast the plague, and suffering corrupted perceptions, here of his invulnerability.

“The Duc De L’Omelette” -- This is a man outwitting the Devil story with a good line (inspired by Alexander the Great saying that, if he were not Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes) uttered by the Duc at story’s end (after beating the Devil at blackjack): that if he were not the Duc he would want to be the Devil. That’s after the dandyish, pretentious Duc has gotten a look at the Devil’s lavish art and furnishings. The Duc was evidently a satiric jab at one of Poe’s contemporaries, N. P. Willis, who was evidently much given to talking about his exotic perfumes, furniture, and pet bird. Evidently, according to Peithman, Poe eventually overcame his initial scorn of Willis and came to admire him.

“Bon-Bon” -- The humor of this story mainly derived from the oddly appropriate combination of pretension in the single person of a gourmet cook and philosopher. The story adopts an ironic tone in proclaiming Bon-Bon’s world-class virtues in both, but we really understand he’s a mediocre, backwater provincial in both. The devil meets him, talks about the subtleties of tasting and devouring various souls. The sheer honor of being found a worthy food makes Bon-Bon offer himself. But, humorously, the devil turns down the offer to eat his soul and Bon-Bon ends up dying from a falling lamp. (Nov. 6, 2005)

“The Devil in the Belfrey” -- This is another, like “Bon-Bon”, interesting satire from Poe in which the Devil makes an appearance. Peithman’s annotation proposes that this is a satire on German intellectualism. In the “Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss” (I missed the pun of Vondervotteimittis meaning “I wonder what time it is” without Peithman’s note, and the satire seems directed against German thought despite a Dutch setting), there is an obsession with knowing the right time, indeed a general obsession with ignoring any reality -- intuitively felt or imagined - not obvious to the eyes. Thus all 60 identical cottages, each with its 24 cabbages and pigs and cats with clock on their tales and clocks on the cottage mantles and clocks in the pockets of the identically dressed children and old men of each cottage, face the seven-faced clock in the middle of this village. (The numbers -- 60, 24, and 7 -- lend credence to French critic Jean-Paul Weber seeing the tale as allegorical though I think Poe hated allegory in general.). The villagers think nothing good exists over the hills surrounding their village -- and aren’t about to experimentally verify that conclusion. There’s is a timeless village. Peithman states this is a satire on German intellectualism but he doesn’t specify. There is the bit when, after the Devil comes to town and causes the clock to strike thirteen, that all the old man act as if a whole hour has mysteriously passed by rather than that the clock has malfunctioned. This could be satire on the perils of relying only on instruments and ones eyes to know reality. On the other hand, this could be either a satire on German/Dutch national character and its rigidity, lack of imagination, and mania for order or some sort of veiled reference to a particular school of German philosophy. (Assuming that is their national character and was perceived so by Poe and that he didn’t like those things.) There is something of an echo of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in that both stories feature communities who have deliberately walled themselves off from reality and whose fortresses are breached by something diabolical. To be sure, Vondervotteimittiss is very staid and not bacchanalic like the castle in “The Masque of the Red Death”, but their world, if not disordered by death, is still disordered by the Devil accosting the town’s bell ringer and striking thirteen. Peithman suggests the story’s moral is “He who isolates himself from the Truth is bound to go to the Devil.” (Nov. 12, 2005)

“Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral” -- This is a genuinely amusing tale of a gambling fiend who keeps constantly tacking the phrase “I bet the Devil my head” to every assertion. Well, the inevitable happens. The Devil appears to call him on his contention that he can perform a certain acrobatic feat and he, of course, fails. Poe is evidently mocking not only Transcendentalism but the belief of some critics that every tale must have a moral or has one implicit in it. The narrator ends the story on a morbid note: he digs the body up of the gambler, Toby Dammit, and, after his requests to the transcendentalists for payment of the bill, sells it for dog food. The satire on Transcendentalism isn’t entirely clear, but Poe speaks of it like a disease.

“The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” -- This is at least the second time I’ve read this story, not exactly even proto-sf but sharing some of the still-to-be-born genre’s sense of wonder with the natural world and technology (less technology in Poe’s case, and more with the wonder and beauty of the natural world), and I appreciated it more the second time around. The conceit is that Scheherazade stretches Sultan Shahriyah’s credibility one story too far (after stringing him along with tales for the famous 1,001 nights) with this story about how Sinbad encounters some Europeans in an iron ship who show him the various wonders of the (mostly natural) world. The Sultan finally has Scheherazade executed. Poe’s simple point is that the world of science (observational and applied in technology) affords wonders more strange than the Tales of the Arabian Nights. Poe’s list of wonders include: petrified forests, Mammoth Cave, volcanic eruptions, lion ants, strange plants parasitic and otherwise, balloons, honeycombs, bird wings, Babbage’s Calculating Machine, the first egg incubators (the annotation here quotes a newspaper article as naively suggesting this is “producing life by machinery”), electrotyping, the Hoe printing press (steam powered which vastly increased its output), platinum working, batteries, the frequencies the human eye is attuned to as well as general optical experiments in destructive interference, an interesting chemistry experiment in which ice is generated in a red-hot crucible, photography, telegraphy, and a swipe at the absurdness of women’s bustles. Many of the annotations explaining what Scheherazade is talking about are from Poe’s own notes. )

“Some Words with a Mummy” -- This was a genuinely funny satire. The premise is that the mummified remains of a whole (rather than traditionally eviscerated) Egyptian are revived, and he has a talk with some modern gentlemen. (The reviving is done by the wonder of galvanism which, in fairness to Poe, still had an unknown relation to life since corpses were made to move using it -- a relationship between the dead and electricity going back, in literature, to at least Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), Poe uses it to poke fun at the notion of progress (the narrator comes to the conclusion that only fussy, voluminous modern clothes and patent medicines are new since the Egyptian’s days) and democracy. The mummy, once presented with a drawing of a modern stump speech, sardonically remarks on mob rule and its long, unfruitful history. Thus, in his eyes, there has not even been political progress. Poe postulates a variety of Egyptian wonders (some by extension since ancient technologies are mentioned by quoted ancient writers even though the technology may not have been used by the Egyptians). Some are real technological advances that modern history accepts. Others, (like the notion that the Egyptians used rails to transport goods -- evidently seriously considered in 1841 -- the year of Poe’s source -- have not held up despite preliminary evidence), are not real. Some are totally made up. The first category includes the obvious sophistication of Egyptian monumental architecture. The second category includes things like steam engines (by way of Hero of Alexandria), Ptolemaic astronomy, and glassmaking. The third category is most interesting. Poe’s Egyptian is from a family that embalms themselves with a special process that does not involve evisceration and is done before they are dead. They are sort of time traveling historians who write histories, are embalmed for a few centuries, reanimated through galvanism, spend a lot of time correcting the fallacious annotations and commentaries on their histories (a swipe at scholarship), and then go back in to suspension. (As Peithman notes -- I suspect by way of James Gunn’s Alternate Worlds which he lists in the bibliography -- this one way time travel via suspended animation shows up later in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and H. G. Wells’ satirical When the Sleeper Wakes.) I think this story not only stands near the beginning of a sf sub-genre, but a couple of other literary traditions as well: the ridicule of scholarly suppositions about the past and the notion that Egyptians possessed modern, highly advanced technology and that they have a vast history unacknowledged by the mainstream. The latter tradition, of course, is a main feature of crank and pseudoscience.

“Loss of Breath” -- This is an odd story. Plotwise, it’s about a man who suddenly loses his breath when he’s about to verbally assault his new bride -- the morning after their wedding no less. Besides leading to trouble vocalizing, it also gets him mistaken for being dead. He goes through a series of adventures eventually ending up in the morgue. The narrator, one Lackobreath meets Mr. Windenough -- who may have been the lover of Mrs. Lackobreath -- the narrator finds love letters from him in her room. Some sort of vaguely hinted at deal is done -- possibly involving the devil. The narrator seems to have recovered his voice. Peithman sees this as a satire on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s philosophic contention that nature could not be subordinated to the human mind because the latter also exists in nature. I don’t see it, but then I’ve never even heard of Schelling. Peithman also puts out the possibility that break is a symbol of the spirit and soul. That seems more credible though doesn’t make the story much clearer or more of a coherent allegory. I think you can see breath, and the attendant ability to vocalize and communicate, as the ability to socialize and interact with ones fellow man. There seems to be something wrong with the narrator given that, on the morning after his wedding, he’s going on a tirade against his wife. His inability to talk gets him mistaken for dead. However, that interpretation doesn’t make the obscure deal at story’s end -- and it’s purpose (as well as the babbling presence of Windenough) -- any clearer.

“Shadow -- A Parable” -- This short story about a group of friends in Ancient Egypt who have locked themselves away from death (rather like the people in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”) contemplating their dead friend and encounter Shadow aka Death is a rumination on death.

“Silence -- A Fable” -- As Peithman notes, this story ends with a “mystery still unsolved”. It’s a rather peculiar fable told by demon about figures in desolate lands. I think Peithman’s explanation that it is linked to Poe’s poem “Sonnet -- Silence” is correct. Both seem to differentiate between the melancholy silence of desolation and absence from dead friends and lovers and the horrible silence that comes from nothing, not even the despair of death. (

“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” -- Poe could rightly claim this was the first story of a voyage to the moon that tried to achieve an air of scientific verisimilitude and, for that reason, this is an important work of proto-sf. Unlike Peithman, I don’t find it a jarring combination of satire (directed against staid businessmen and the sort of Dutchman/American that Washington Irving featured in some of his stories). However, like the first time I read this story more than 20 years ago, I found it hard going. I’m just not that interested in the minutiae, however well thought out, of Hans Pfaall’s balloon, air condenser, and air curtain. I did find it interesting that Hans Pfaall lightly treats the pre-calculated murder of his creditors, and it is interesting that Poe practically tears down his whole scientific edifice by having the tale be a hoax though Peithman sees this as ambiguity -- Poe offering another explanation for events, I take the hoax ending to be the one Poe wanted us to walk away with. The effect he seems to have gone with is the revelation of a practical joke. The quotation of Poe’s extensive notes was interesting, especially when he talks about how his story is superior to Richard Adams Locke’s “Discoveries in the Moon”, published three weeks later. Poe suspected plagiarism (he often suspected plagiarism, even of work not his own), but Peithman rightly points out Locke doesn’t attempt, as Poe shows, much in the way of scientific accuracy and is mostly concerned with the lunarians and their civilization, something Poe only hints at at story’s end. The story does show Poe’s interest in astronomy and reading of the works of Sir John Herschel. Poe has volcanoes on the moon, their ejecta meteorites which whiz by Pfaall’s balloon. Peithman says that meteorites from lunar volcanoes seems to be a Poe invention and rightly says there have been no lunar volcanoes for millions of years. (In Poe’s day, though, there were respectable ideas about current lunar vulcanism.)

“The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign” -- This is a genuinely funny story involving the distinguished Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith whom the narrator tries to find out more about. Specifically, he wants to know about the famous (but he doesn’t know the story) fate of the General when captured by Indians in the titular military campaign. It turns out that the General lost all four limbs, part of his tongues, teeth, eyes, jaw, and hair. His artificial parts account for his very pleasing form and voice and carriage. Peithman says this is a satire on modernity and, at the time of its writing, the growing prosthetic limb industry. That’s probably true, but I’m also reminded of the whittling down of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide.

“The Island of the Fay” -- This beautiful story has a not uncommon origin: Poe wrote the story to accompany a magazine engraving by his friend John Sartain who, in turn, copied a painting by English artist John Martin. The story starts out as a rumination on nature and an early draft of some of the ideas that were to appear six years later in Poe’s "Eureka". The story ends with a rumination on death and the decay of all things as, on an enchanted island, a fairy circles the island, visibly dying, a depiction of her brief life, the darkness that falls over all.

“Eleonora” -- This is another beautiful story from Poe, as Peithman notes, the most romantic (at least that I’ve read so far) he did. The story involves a couple who live in an isolated valley (as Peithman notes, shades of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas). It has the flavor of Poe’s “Berenice” and “Ligeia”. Like the former story, the narrator and his lover group as cousins and in seeming isolation from anyone else. That element of virtual, dream-like isolation from a past and the rest of humanity, a pocket universe of affection and romantic interest, is also a part of “Ligeia” where the narrator can’t even remember when he met his wife. As in many Poe stories involving the love for a woman, there is tragedy. The narrator’s wife dies of disease. One is tempted to see autobiography here, but this story was first published in 1841, about six years before Virginia Poe died though there is a strong element of “clairvoyant” imagining of Poe as to how he would take Virginia’s death. In “Berenice” the narrator obsesses he has buried his wife too early and takes her teeth as a memento. Here there is sort of a concern, when he remarries, that he has spiritually buried his former wife too soon -- especially since he insisted on promising, before she died, that he would never remarry. There are, of course, several Poe stories -- “Ligeia”, “Morella”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher” -- where dead women do not rest easy and drive their former husbands or brothers mad. Here Eleonora does not rest either, but, on the night of the narrator’s remarriage, she visits him and salves his conscience at breaking his vow, absolves him of blame.

“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” -- This is another Poe tale of metempsychosis aka reincarnation. Here a young man in the Ragged Mountains of North Carolina (Poe, when he lived in Charlottesville, frequently walked near them) seems to experience memories from a past life -- or his physician, who hypnotizes him, may have implanted memories of his dead friend in the man. Poe leaves some ambiguity.

“Mesmeric Revelation” -- This story is a tedious read on the level of entertainment. It is a philosophical discussion on the afterlife and spirituality, mostly, told by the hypnotized Vankirk to the narrator. Under hypnosis, Vankirk talks about the great truths he discovers while under hypnosis but which leave just a vague feeling of contentment upon awakening. Poe was somewhat skeptical of some of the claims about hypnosis, and he was delighted that many people, including Swedenborgians, thought the philosophical dialogue which takes up most of this story, was a real transcript of an actual hypnosis session. On the other hand, it’s not a satire. Many of the ideas here showed up later in Poe’s "Eureka". Vankirk dies at the end of the story, a smile on his face. In terms of Poe’s place in developing sf, it’s worth noting that he speaks of the importance of environment in determining the mental and physical life of any inhabitants (this before Darwin more clearly explained how environment shapes organisms) of other planets: “There are many things on the Earth, which would be nihility to the inhabitants of Venus -- many things visible and tangible in Venus, which we could not be brought to appreciate as existing at all.” This is from a time when literature had not really produced any truly alien extraterrestrials -- just humans with funny outer shapes and different sizes. Whether Poe’s remarks influenced any future sf writer when doing aliens, I don’t know, but it points out a realization he had and who knows whether Poe, with a longer life, would have given us real aliens. The only place they show up in his work is “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”, and the lunarians there are just funny sized humans.

“The Balloon-Hoax” -- Though not a work of sf or even proto-sf, this is tangentially related to Poe’s work in the latter because it is a hoax involving a technological wonder -- something important, as John J. Pierce demonstrated, in sf’s 19th century history. Second, it shows Poe’s ability to suspend disbelief by careful research and accumulation of detail -- something important to an sf writer. Third, it influenced Jules Verne’s -- as did much of Poe. Peithman’s introduction has two interesting notes: Poe’s account of the wild success of the hoax and a very different account which has a drunken Poe telling people at the newspaper’s door that the story was a hoax. The story is based on the early balloonist’s Monck Mason’s accounts. It’s probably not a coincidence that the protagonist of Rudy Rucker’s The Hollow Earth is named Mason.

“The Angel of the Odd: An Extravaganza” -- This story reminded, with its titular figure insuring that odd things happen -- particularly to the detriment of the narrator who questions him -- of Alfred Bester’s “The Pi Man”. The story gets some genuine humor out of the sheer ludicrousness of the events shown.

“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” -- As Peithman notes, this story served as the model for H. P. Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”. But I think more than the plot influenced Lovecraft. The beginning of this story, with the cold detachment of the narrator defending his experiment, served as a model for the narrative tone of scientific and scholarly detachment Lovecraft was to use so effectively in his later work. Though, of course, a Lovecraft hero is more than likely to be justifying why inquiry should be stopped in an area or why findings must be suppressed.

“Mellonta Tauta” -- The humor doesn’t really work any more in this story -- if it ever did -- and a surprising amount of space is taken up with attacking mere philosophical notions Poe didn’t like rather than describing future wonders, but this story is probably one of the very earliest examples of a couple of sf themes: how the telescoping of time renders seemingly important events trivial (here the rather humorous depiction of an obscure ruin in 2848 being the remnants of a monument (one actually never completed) to George Washington -- whose exploits are clearly not appreciated or understood by the narrator) and the related theme of humorous misunderstandings by the future’s denizens about our own time. ( )