A review of Nightmares with the Bible recently appeared in which the reviewer said he didn’t get the Poe references. Indeed, the anonymous reviewer said the same thing. What neither of them understood is that Edgar Allan Poe has been formative for my life and that book was a tribute to him. Did Poe write about demons? Not really. Did he once claim that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic theme? Yes. I saw the opportunity, in discussing possession movies, to draw Poe’s observation into the conversation. Could the book have been written without it? Yes and no. Yes, I could’ve written a book on demons without mentioning Poe. No, I would likely not be writing books at all were it not for Poe.
Today is Poe’s birthday. What is this strange attraction I have for him? It began, as most things do for me, with growing up poor. We couldn’t afford bookstore prices, and that’s even assuming there was a bookstore nearby (there wasn’t). I found the majority of my reading material at Goodwill in Seneca, Pennsylvania. The shop had a book bin or two with prices I could afford (books were a quarter, if I recall). I found a copy of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Terror there. I probably heard about Poe from my big brother—he’s a good source for scary information. Reading Poe, I wanted to read more. We couldn’t afford Scholastic school fare rates, but I did find a four-or-five volume collection of Poe’s writings at Goodwill. Foolishly, I bought only two—those with his stories.
By high school I was checking out biographies of Poe from the library. Perhaps as the child of an alcoholic I identified with a man who seemed so tormented. I count his stories still among my favorites. My favorite short story is, I believe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It has come back to me at several points in my life and I find myself thinking about that gloomy house. Particularly the narrator’s arrival there. So full of possibilities. So much potential fear. Those of us who consume horror have a gateway to it—some event, or influence, or person who introduced the aesthetic of fear to us. For me it was Edgar A. Poe. Nightmares with the Bible is of a piece with Holy Horror. To leave Poe out of it would’ve been the worst kind of sacrilege.
