Poe: New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
Posted on February 28, 2014 by Flames
To coincide with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, this anthology celebrates the depth and diversity of one of the most important figures in literature. Compiled by multi-award winning editor, Ellen Datlow, it presents some of the foremost talents of the genre, who have come together to reimagine tales inspired by Poe.
Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, M. Rickert, and more, have lent their craft to this anthology, retelling such classics as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” exploring the very fringes of the genre.
Poe: New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe is available now at DriveThruFiction.com.
Publishers Weekly Review:
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.
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