*reveling in obscure weirdness once again: Alraune, by Hanns Heinz Ewers

9780987195395
Birchgrove Press, 2013
340 pp
originally published 1911
translated by S. Guy Endore
paperback


That decadent vibe -- I just love it and this book is filled with it.  Alraune brings together a bit of the grotesque, the perverse, and all manner of weirdness that appeals, but when all is said and done, it's the German style of decadence that resonates.    It is Ewers' second entry in his Frank Braun trilogy, between The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Vampire, neither of which I've read. Alraune is another word for mandrake, the legends of which  go way back in history, but for our purposes, it's the German version told in this book that's relevant:

"The criminal stripped naked as a pair of tongs and hanged at the crossroads, lost, so the story goes, his final seed, the moment his neck was broken. This seed falls to the ground and there germinates. Thence resonates an alraune, either a little man or a little woman."

In the house of King's Councilor Gontram,  there is an alraune manikin made of wood hanging on the wall; according to the same legend, it "served as an amulet against witchcraft and drew money into the house."  Present at the house when the manikin is discovered is Frank Braun, nephew to Jacob ten Brinken, who is Privy Councilor and scientist involved in some pretty bizarre experiments.  Braun decides that his uncle should "create an alraune: one that will be alive, one of flesh and blood." He is fascinated with the idea, and tells his uncle that he is the only one who can "make truth out of the lie," by bringing the legend to life.  Off to the lab goes our somewhat mad scientist with the sperm of a hanged man, with which he inseminates a prostitute and thus is born Alraune, formed "against all laws of nature." Even before she's born, she can be heard screaming in the womb, much like the mandrake is supposed to sound as it's being pulled out of the earth.  After her birth she is adopted by ten Brinken, baptized, and later sent off to school where she begins to realize that no one, absolutely no one, male or female, can resist her.  People are like Alraune's toys -- she plays with them for a while, gets what she wants from them, and then they are discarded. A better analogy is that she is the proverbial flame luring the moth -- and when some poor soul gets too close to her,  he/she finds his/her wings singed or even sometimes flat out destroyed. The story follows Alraune as she grows up, makes her father's fortune, and plays with people, up until one man comes along who seems to be immune to her.

There are so many ways anyone could read this novel so I'm not going to go into the under-the-surface stuff here.  Suffice it to say that Alraune is downright weird, and its sheer weirdness is augmented by the original drawings by Mahlon Blaine.  For example, here's his depiction of death "gliding through the quiet house"

(that's a cigar in the skeleton's mouth), and an illustration of Alraune's "father's" perverse feelings toward her, in a scene where she's dressed up like an "elevator-boy in a tight-fitting scarlet uniform," since it pleases him when she dresses like a boy:

Seriously, there's some very messed up stuff going on in this novel, but by now everyone knows I love really strange books and that I love old books -- Alraune is a bizarre blend of both.  Try at your own risk -- it's really going to appeal to readers who appreciate the old decadent aesthetic, and frankly,  it is just plain odd but I  loved it.  This book crawled underneath my skin and hasn't left.

Oh! PS:  I forgot -- I did watch an adaptation of this novel, English title "Unnatural," with Erich von Stroheim as ten Brinken and Hildegarde Neff in the title role.  It leaves a lot to be desired in terms of the novel as well as the acting, but it was still fun.

still playing catchup from June with I'm Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid

9781501126925
Scout Press/Simon and Schuster, 2016
210 pp

hardcover

Before I even start talking about this novel, I have to say up front that while giving a book a one-star review is certainly any reader's prerogative, Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things  absolutely does not deserve the nasty, vehement comments that were given to it by some of the Amazon "reviewers"  who afforded it a single star.   Quite frankly, screw that crap.   Far from a logical, rational explanation as to why these people didn't like the book, I was actually taken aback by the level of sheer hateful negativity coming out of these people.  There weren't as many venomous two-star reviews, but even those readers weren't offering any sort of cohesive argument as to why they didn't care for the book.  Shame on you people -- a) go take a basic English 101 course at your local community college and learn how to more logically present a written argument and b) if you're completely flummoxed by the content of this novel, well, seriously ... while you're relearning your writing skills, sign up for a basic course in Jungian psychology.  The author pretty much clues us in as to how to read this book right up front -- it's certainly not his fault that people don't read closely enough to listen.  And if I had any balls, I'd say so on Amazon, but the fact is that I'm completely thin skinned, fairly emotional,  and I just couldn't take the resulting shitstorm. Oh my, my  language is REALLY awful today, apologies,  -- but frankly, I'm just getting downright sick of  how people seem to believe it's their god-given right to unleash their nastiness anywhere they see fit nowadays.

Personally speaking, I thought it was a good, not great, book on the nature of self, the nature of identity, and an interesting take on the darkness of human nature. It's definitely dark, and it is precisely that darkness that appeals to me.  However, what killed it for me is that I figured it all out very early on, so I don't quite understand why so many people were left so confused with this novel, because the author basically gives the reader more than enough clues as to what's going on that it should have been pretty easy to put together and to understand.  While it may have something to do with my long tenure as a mystery/crime reader where I'm used to picking up on certain things that tend to stick in my head, what I really think is that the author made things way too easy here. And in fact, that is my biggest complaint about this book. Having an inkling of what was coming sort of made the big wow not as big for me as it may have been at the end.

On the other hand, despite the fact that  I sort of knew how things were going to play out, my guts still churned moving toward the last page. Frankly, I think Mr. Reid is a writer with much potential, and considering that this is his first novel, I think he's done a pretty good job here, and I will look forward to his future work.

*Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind

0375725849
Vintage International, 2001
originally published as Das Parfum, 1986
translated by John E. Woods
255 pp

paperback

"What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love."

There are just some books you want to sit down and discuss with a group of people, and Perfume is definitely one of those.  A couple of days after I'd finished it, I went to look at reader reviews and found a number of different takes on it.  For example, on Amazon, one reader referred to it as "one of the best, strangest thriller novels..." , another praised its "dark, gothic, serial killer plot of a genre pageturner," still another says it's a "commentary on perversion, unfettered arrogance, and ironically misplaced idealism."  So I went to goodreads to see what readers there said, and found "one of the greatest horror novels ever written," and "a cross between Silence of the Lambs and a period drama."  Sheesh -- the interpretations seem endless!!

  So then I went to contemporary reviews of this book and even here I got very different impressions.  For example (and with apologies to anyone without an NYRB archives subscription) Robert M. Adams' NYRB review saw it as a story of

"an alleged sniffer of genius, born to squalor in eighteenth-century France, who by sheer concentrated nose-power rises to be the supreme perfumer of his age, and simultaneously an atrocious criminal."

He also said it was "a ridiculously improbably piece of verbose claptrap..." as well as an allegory of the Third Reich.  Peter Ackroyd, writing in the New York Times, says it's a "meditation on the nature of death, desire and decay."

However anyone may understand or interpret this novel, it just screams let's sit down and talk about it.

[just an fyi: there are a couple of spoilers ahead so beware]:

 I'm tempted to throw it onto this year's real-world book group list, but for some reason my friends don't really do deep dark, and this book is deep dark.  I think that one way to make sense of it is to read it as a story (in part) of personal and artistic identity; it can also be read as one man's quest for purpose, meaning, love, and perfection by a person whose life up to a certain point was destined to remain alone in the stink and squalor of the life he was born into. It's only after his first murder that our main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille,  begins to understand that  "Never before in his life had he known what happiness was... for until now he had merely existed like an animal."  His purpose begins taking form at this moment, as he realizes that he

"must become a creator of scents. And not just an average one. But rather, the greatest perfumer of all time." (43)

And why? He viewed the scent of his first victim as the  "higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty."  He believed that unless he "possessed this scent, his life would have no meaning," so he goes on to try to capture it, hence the series of murders that follows. But there is method to Grenouille's madness. This story isn't about someone who kills just anyone -- as we're told,  "What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love."

Ironically, this "higher principle"  is really only understood by one other person, the father (Richis) of Laure, Grenouille's last victim:

"For if one imagined -- and so Richis imagined -- all the victims not as single individuals, but as parts of some higher principle and thought of each one's characteristics as merged in some idealistic fashion into a unifying whole, then the picture assembled out of such mosaic pieces would be the picture of absolute beauty, and the magic that radiated from it would no longer be of human, but of divine origin."  (203)  

 Obviously there's so much more to this novel that I can't really go into here although I wish I could -- the very important connection between being scentless and the resulting perception of being soulless (and in my opinion I can read "self" less here), Grenouille's time in seclusion, the bizarre ending ... there's just too, too much.  But I will say that I absolutely loved this book on many levels and was hooked from page one.  God, this is a great novel!!

Laure Richis (as played by Rachel Hurd-Wood) from the movie 

Sadly, to me anyway, while the film was okay and while I couldn't stop watching,  it sort of missed some of the (if you'll pardon the pun) essence of the novel. There are a number of differences between book and movie, but the book offers so much more in terms of sensory details that to me are highly important -- as just one example from the beginning, why it is that Jean-Baptiste is shunned as an infant by his first caretakers, the wet nurse and then a Catholic priest.  Plus, I really, really hate voice-overs on films, but that's just me.  Read the book, then see the movie in that order, and chances are you won't need the voice-overs.

this one I really liked -- My Bones and My Flute: A Ghost Story in the Old-Fashioned Manner, by Edgar Mittelholzer

9781845232955
Peepal Tree Press, 2015
originally published 1955
231 pp

paperback (read in June)

I enjoyed this book so very much that even before I'd turned the last page, I bought another work by Edgar Mittelholzer.   Considering I'd never even heard of him before buying this book, I'd say that's a recommendation for reading this writer's work.

As our story opens, we learn that this tale is the work of Milton Woodsley, who in 1954 has written a book about a series of strange occurrences that he was part of in 1933.  He guarantees that he's combed through the facts as noted in his diary of twenty years earlier, and that this book is indeed a "true record" of events "including  nothing that might be attributed to my imagination."  He had originally intended on publishing just his diary notes "as they stood," but he was convinced by the three other principal players to a) "let it be a good thrilling sort of old-fashioned ghost story, with the mystery solved at the end," b) to write it up in "sonorous prose style" with  "as much 'form and shape'" that he could manage, and c) to add into it a "lot of atmosphere and excitement."   And all three of these elements are definitely here, although Milton himself wonders if the actual mystery was truly solved when all is said and done.   That question, he says, must be left up to the reader, and as it turns out, Milton is spot on with his observation.

We then go back in time to 1933, where young Milton is on a steamer heading up Guyana's Berbice River out of New Amsterdam.  He had been invited to accompany Mr. Ralph Nevinson along with his wife Nell and daughter Jessie, to Nevison's company's up-river station at Goed de Vries for two weeks and while there, Milton's job will be to paint "some pictures depicting jungle scenes" that "would adorn the walls of their head office."  After the steamer had gone more than half way, Milton has this sort of flash that his inclusion on this trip was more about something else other than painting; it was then that he realized that "things were not what they appeared to be."  As it turns out, he learns from Jessie that her father had only just returned from Goed de Vries a month earlier and that since he'd been back, he'd been "nervy and jumpy" for reasons unknown to her, but what really captures his attention is that suddenly, out of nowhere, Jessie asks him about the sound of a flute playing on a lower deck:

"Don't you hear that flute? It's the same one I've been hearing for some days now in Queenstown."

Milton can't hear a thing, but then Nevinson admits that he can also hear the flute playing, confiding in Milton that he hears it right beside him.  Milton is puzzled but Nevinson eventually lets him in on what's going on.  Nevinson's hobby was collecting anything related to the early history of the colony, and some two years earlier, he had learned of a manuscript that was

"supposed to bring good fortune to its possessor, provided it was kept shut away in safety from daylight and fire."

However, it comes with the explicit warning that  "it must not be handled at any time."

Berbice River at sunset, courtesy of Guyana Tourism Board

Nevinson never saw the manuscript, but was definitely intrigued, and he tells Milton that just the month before when he'd gone to Goed de Vries, he discovered that its owner had died and left him the manuscript sealed in a canister.  Nevinson, who is "the last person on earth who thinks twice about superstitions," decides to open the canister and on arriving back home, sits down to translate the manuscript.

And now here I have to add a [sidebar]: The name M.R. James appears more than once in this book, and while there are a number of reasons why this is so (which I'll leave for other readers to discover), one is most obvious -- as in many of James' stories, everything begins when someone starts messing around with things best left alone. So you might imagine that I wasn't surprised when Nevinson fails to heed the warning.   The irony of the situation is that he is a huge fan of James' work, even carrying a copy of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary into the jungle with him.  I mean, come on ... you'd think someone who is that big of a fanboy should have known better!  Now back to the book.

It was then that he began to hear the flute, and no matter where he goes, it's always with him.  Soon, the entire family and Milton are infected and find themselves at the mercy of some pretty strange forces. Even worse, they find themselves racing against the clock to fight off whatever evils are attacking them.

Like most of the books I read, My Bones and My Flute can be read strictly for its surface value -- in this case, a creepy, mysterious ghost story where the tension ratchets over the course of the book -- or for people who want to dive deeper, there's certainly plenty lurking beneath: race, the immense power of the jungle landscape, Guyana's troubled slave past, and much, much more. One thing I didn't pay much attention to but discovered while reading the introduction -- which should absolutely be left until the end of the book to avoid any sort of spoilers, so don't be a Nevinson and disregard the warning -- is that you can read this story as a book about writing, since Milton is coming at this tale retrospectively, trying to create a polished product from diary notes, often stopping to refer to the process throughout the novel.

No matter how you choose to read it, My Bones and My Flute is a fine ghost story that had me flipping pages until I'd finished, and as I said earlier, it is so very well done that without hesitating for a second, I immediately picked up another of Mittelholzer's Caribbean novels. My only issues: there are some pretty overwrought, overwritten sections in this book that are almost laughable and the ending sort of left me with a few more questions, but on the whole, it is one that serious readers of older supernatural stories will not want to miss.  Quite frankly, I feel like I hit paydirt when I discovered this  novel, and I can't wait to read his next one, Shadows Move Among Them.  If you're into rare and obscure finds, this should definitely be a part of your library.

Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker, by Jean Lorrain

1872621651
Tartarus Press, 2002
247 pp

hardcover


"But I know that I play my part too. I make that dreadful hell myself; I, and I alone, provide its trappings." -- (128)

One thing before I post my thoughts about this book: my copy is from Tartarus, but Snuggly Books earlier this year released a very affordable copy (go ahead, click ... I reap no gain for each click from Amazon) making this book widely available for all.

now...

As I posted on Goodreads earlier, I had no clue when I first picked up Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas that it would mark the beginning of my obsession with this author, and indeed, this entire school of writing.  I also noted that Lorrain's work has a way of causing the outside world to disappear because I am so deep into his, a rarity for me.  This collection of 27 short stories only cements that feeling.

Once again, I won't be going into any detail at all about any of these dark tales because, like the stories in The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies,  they really are best discovered on one's own.  The  contents of this collection are divided into Early Stories (7), Sensations (9), Souvenirs (3), Récits (4) and Contes (4), and they are some of the best, darkest, eeriest works I've ever read.

Brian Stableford's excellent introduction to this volume offers the reader a look at not just the contents of these stories, but also a brief glimpse into Lorrain's somewhat troubled life.  His stories here (and elsewhere) encompass what was at the time "sexual perversity," which as Stableford notes in another excellent work Glorious Perversity, cost him any chance of being translated into English and being noted as  a "writer of the first rank in his own country."  Luckily, Stableford himself has translated Lorrain's work, and as a bonus, he is an expert in the field of Decadent fiction.

Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker shows a very wide-ranging Jean Lorrain.  As always, most his stories reveal,  as one of his characters notes in "The Possessed,"  "the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life that turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror." (124). His Contes are just plain unsettling, taking place among the beauty and strangeness of nature, and his supernatural stories are dark, ambiguous, and caused no end of unease.

from AZ Quotes

One of the main themes in these stories, and the one that seems to crop up in all of Lorrain's writing, is the horror of the masque. As he notes in "One of Them,"

"The masque is the disturbed and disturbing face of the unknown. It is the smile of mendacity. It is the very soul of that terrifying perversity which understands depravity. It is lust spiced with fear, the alarming and delicious risk of throwing down a challenge to the curiosity of the senses. 'Is she ugly? Is she beautiful? Is she young? Is she old?' It is politeness seasoned by the macabre and heightened perhaps, by a dash of baseness and taste of blood -- for where will the adventure end? In a cheap hotel or the residence of some great demi-mondaine? Or perhaps the police station, for thieves also conceal themselves in order to commit their crimes. With their solicitous and terrible false faces, masques may serve cut-throats as well as the cemetery does; there are bag-snatchers out there, and whores...and revenants." (62)

His exploration into masks and the people beneath them and what they reveal about Paris society of the time through his eyes is one of the reasons I am so in love with this author.

One more thing:  among the stories here, there are a number in which the characters partake of ether as their drug of choice.  That should come as no surprise, but what's interesting is that they seem to develop an acute awareness of just how damaging ether is to the mind and to the body. For me, these are some of the best tales in the book -- a bit self-reflexive, if you will.

I cannot explain why these stories fascinate me the way they do, but while I'm in his brain I don't want to leave. I know that sounds kind of strange, but it is what it is.  It is a dark and dangerous place but for some reason, his work exerts some kind of bizarre pull that I can't resist.

Highly, beyond highly, recommended.

doppelgangers, part one: The Poor Clare, by Elizabeth Gaskell

image from Melville House

9781612192185
Melville House, 2013
92 pp

paperback

First things first. This particular edition of The Poor Clare is part of Melville House's Art of the Novella series, which I subscribed to for a long time before I realized that I was starting to get duplicates. It's a wonderful set of books that has introduced me to the work of many authors I hadn't read before and is well worth every cent I paid.   In the front of this book, there's a brief note that this particular edition is reprinted from Gaskell's Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (1896 ed.); it first made its appearance in Dickens' Household Words in 1856.

Second things second.   After finishing Nabokov's Despair and The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock, I found myself fascinated with the idea of doppelgangers (yes, I know there's an umlaut but I'm too lazy right now to do character map) in fiction, so I decided to put together a little mini-series of doppelganger books to fit into my summer reading.  Here's the list in no particular order:

• Alraune, by Hanns Heinz Ewers (which I've been told is very strange)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg
• The Devil's Elixirs, by ETA Hoffman
• The Double, by Dostoevsky
• Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark

and of course, this book, The Poor Clare, by Elizabeth Gaskell.  

And that brings me to third things third, which is where I talk about the book. I know that it's been labeled as a Gothic tale, but in my mind, this story of revenge and redemption sits much more squarely in the supernatural zone. It is a compelling and eerie tale,  involving a horrific curse that will come to have serious repercussions beyond anything even remotely imaginable. 

The story is revealed retrospectively through the eyes of a young lawyer who will eventually find himself caught up in the events that are chronicled in this tale.   Bridget Fitzgerald had served as nurse and companion to the now late Madame Starkey and her husband the squire in the English countryside of Lancashire,  after having followed them to St. Germains and to Antwerp. Her time with the Starkeys was only broken up by her marriage; when she became a widow she, along with her daughter Mary,  once again returned to the Starkey home.  The Starkeys had to live abroad to practice their religion, as England was staunchly anti-Catholic; eventually, however, they make their return followed by Bridget and Mary, where their power is great among the servants, and their word goes in the household.   Bridget is given a cottage to live in just a "short cut" away from the manor house; things were very good until rebellious Mary decides to leave home to take up a position with a good family, leaving only her little spaniel, a "dumb remembrancer of happy days", upon which Bridget lavishes love as if it were her child.   Mary writes faithfully at first, but  as time goes by, the letters from Mary to Bridget stop coming.  After some time of no communication, Bridget makes what turns out to be a fruitless search for her daughter before returning to her cottage and hiding herself away from the outside world.    Often heard talking to herself,  the locals come to believe that she's some sort of  witch.   However, her solitude is broken when one day,  during a hunt at the old Starkey manor, one of the participants shoots her beloved dog.  Bridget's rage knows no bounds when the shooter makes light of the dog's death; she lays a horrible curse upon him.  Unfortunately for everyone concerned, her grief, her rage and her thirst for revenge are just the beginning of a completely unforeseen tragedy.   

Elizabeth Gaskell, from The British Library

While anti-Catholicism is definitely woven into this tale in various ways, along with class differences   and the repressed anger/power of women,  another very important element found here is that of redemption,  which made me wonder if this story couldn't also be in part a plea for religious tolerance. That would make sense; after all, anti-Catholic feelings were still strong during Gaskell's lifetime, exacerbated by the influx of Irish immigrants coming to England during the Great Famine.

As to how the doppelganger element comes into the story, sadly I can't really go into any depth about it  without divulging too much.  What I can reveal is my own conclusion about why Gaskell chose to include it --  since it is female,  to me it represents the emergence of a part of the female self which has been stifled by men who desire a particular sort of quiet subservience in their women. Given the events of this tale and the time period, it seems a logical conclusion but again, I can't really give anything away.  

On the other hand, if you really don't care about picking up undercurrents or subtext and just want a well-written, different and entertaining read, The Poor Clare  is still a good choice for dark fiction readers. I loved it.  It's almost like a mystery in parts; the only down side is that it is a bit abrupt at the end so beware. I had to go back through the last few pages more than once to make sure I got it right.  Overall, though,  it's one of the strangest tales I've read in a while, and it's a very good one.  It's also very unlike Gaskell's other stories that I've read so it might be a new experience for readers who enjoy her work.

The Port-Wine Stain, by Norman Lock

9781942658061
Bellevue Literary Press, 2016
224 pp

paperback

(read in May)

"To see oneself mirrored by another can be unnerving." 

This novel is really getting the short end of the stick from early reviewers over at LibraryThing, and I think that's just plain sad.   What I've noticed is that some of these people picked up this book expecting a Poe clone and didn't get it, thereby allowing their expectations to guide their reading experience.  I learned a long time ago that if you assume one thing and get another, well, newsflash , you're going to be disappointed -- so the trick for me has been to sit back and let the book take me where it's going to go. Someone once told me that "assume" makes an ass out of you and me, so I just let my books speak to me on their own. And this one spoke to me about just how easy it is for someone already quite impressionable to be pushed from sanity to madness.  That transition lands this book squarely into my reading wheelhouse.

The quotation from chapter one is from Poe's "William Wilson," an apt start to this novel since somewhere down the line the main character/narrator (a physician)  is going to encounter what he feels is his own doppelganger.  The story is told from his perspective to a friend, looking back from present (1876)  to thirty years in the past. He captures the attention of his friend by promising to reveal how he "came to know" Edgar Allan Poe and how Poe "initiated" him into the occult, ushering him "to the iron door of the tomb" where "he bid me knock;" the story of "the winter months I spent with him." He also reveals that for a short time, he was a "principal character in one of his horrors."

 However, there's a catch: as the narrator states right up front,

"I'm a careful observer of the body's minutest motions, its fevers, crises, maladies, disturbances, but however clearly I seem to see my past, I can't be certain that what I remember of it is the truth. Memory is as liable to blight as the soul ..." 

giving us our first clue that perhaps this narrator is going to be less than reliable.

Very, very briefly, young Edward Fenzil is an assistant to the renowned Dr. Mütter, who in 1844 Philadelphia is already famous for his successes in reconstructive surgery. One day Mütter receives a visitor who, as he reveals to Fenzil, is none other than Edgar Allan Poe. Fenzil has never heard of Poe, nor has he ever read any of his work. A week later, Poe returns, "fascinated" by Mütter's collection -- his specimens -- and Mütter gives Edward the task of showing Poe around and giving him "every assistance." The relationship between Fenzil and Poe intensifies as time goes on, as they spend long nights together and as Poe begins to bring young Fenzil into his rather bizarre world. But things take a very weird turn when Poe and his friends from the Thanatopsis Club decide to "initiate" Edward into the group, starting a sequence of events that lead to a most horrific tragedy and an unexpected ending that blew me away.

Here's the thing:  as I said, if you're expecting a Poe-centric story or Poe clone here, you're going to be disappointed. Yes, he's in the book, and yes, the author does take you into his sad, dark world, where he finds a "strange beauty in suffering."  But here the narrative firmly belongs to Fenzil, not Poe, so Edward is most definitely the one to watch.   Another thing: many readers have complained about the style and the prose of this novel, but anyone who reads widely in 19th-century literature will have no problems with it. I suppose that many of the negatives may come from people who do the so-called "fifty-page rule," and who didn't find it punchy or exciting enough within that space to continue reading or at least to give the book more of a chance.  It's not that I think the book is great, because I don't (like a 3.5 on a 5-star scale)  but it is very dark and examines how the sanity of a seemingly-normal yet impressionable person can be so easily tipped over the edge, making it a book that is right up my alley.

My thanks to LibraryThing and to Bellevue Literary Press for my copy.