In Poe, Ellen Datlow collects 19 dark stories inspired by the master of mystery, mood, and horror, Edgar Allan Poe. Each story is followed by an author’s note describing the Poe influences on the foregoing tale.

Kim Newman starts the anthology with a humorous survey of man Poe tales in “Illimitable Domain,” about a B-movie house that starts ripping off Poe plots because they’re cheap and out of copyright. All goes well; the profits roll in. Then the studio decides it wants to do something a bit different, but, no matter what movie is filmed, Poe elements infiltrate it. Then they spread out to appear in other movies and media. So much for public domain! Newman’s story functions as a high-spirited introduction for the book, touching on many works accessibly for those unfamiliar with Poe’s oeuvre; at the same time, Newman’s clever allusions to Poe themes keep Poe enthusiasts’ minds nimble.

Ravens seem to be necessary characters in Poe-related works, so, of course, these birds turn up in this anthology in Melanie Tem’s “The Pickers,” about a grief-stricken woman and her young son, Ryan. Toni mourns the death of her husband and tries to take care of her son, but her overwhelming sadness threatens her mental integrity. Enter D, one of the possibly human, possibly not “pickers,” who sort through and recycle people’s trash. D forces her way into Toni’s life with uncertain intent, either to help or harm. Tem balances the portrayal of D between intrusive, compassionate, and sinister, successfully capturing the grief-blurring perceptions of Toni. As much a touching evocation of loss as an unsettling tale of supernatural invasion, “The Pickers” builds smoothly to an ambivalent ending that highlights the tricksy powers of ravens.

“Beyond Porch and Portal” by E. Catherine Tobler takes as its jumping-off point the fact that, days before his death, Poe was found wandering, drunk, in Baltimore, wearing someone else’s clothes. Agnes, Poe’s distant relation and the narrator, tries to make sense of this fact, as well as Poe’s insistence that he is being stalked by a reality-altering man called Reynolds. In her pursuit of Reynolds, Agnes is sucked into another nightmare dimension where time runs differently, providing an explanation for Poe’s strange works and his debilitated state. Reynolds and his dimension of origin certainly come across as creepy, but not so much menacing and soul-sucking, possibly because most of the characters, except for the delirious and anxious Poe, lack personalities, thus preventing readers from true investment in the tale.

“The Final Act” by Gregory Frost follows two characters in a symbiotic love-hate relationship. Leonard, the responsible, more uptight one, has loathed McGowren’s attention-whore antics since high school. Nevertheless, Leonard constantly caves, eventually helping McGowren secure a job at the same law firm where he works. McGowren’s mooching of a ride off of Len seems to be yet another exploitation as usual. Then long-standing animosities flare, and McGowren insinuates that he may have killed Len’s wife. Frost’s tale moves along at a steady, suspenseful clip, exploring the macabre extremes of neediness and self-torture, while never losing its grip on believability.

Kenshi and his sometime lover, Swayne, hook up in an Indian bathhouse in “Strappado” by Laird Barron. With a bunch of other bored thrill-seekers, the two men perk up when they hear about the highly secretive, borderline illegal performance art exhibit of one “van Iblis.” Kenshi, Swayne, and the others follow the promise of novelty to a remote site where nasty fates befall them. Heavy on the atmosphere and slowly building sense of anxiety, “Strappado” describes a horror movie from the viewpoint of the fearful and clueless protagonist.

“The Mountain House” by Sharyn McCrumb is about NASCAR racing, which, on the surface, does not seem particularly conducive to a Poe-like treatment. However, when the main character is a racing widow who retreats to an Appalachian estate to mourn her dead husband, you can see where this is going, since many of Poe’s works treat those who are haunted by the supposedly dead past. In this case, main character befriends an Appalachian kid born and bred, who seems to have a connection to stock-car racers long gone. McCrumb delivers a heartfelt paean to the beauty and danger of racing, and her palpable compassion for subjects and people that may be dismissed by some as “redneck” makes this one of the sweeter and more elegiac tales in the book.

“The Pikesville Buffalo” by Glen Hirshberg starts off as an affectionate character sketch of two eccentric great-aunts, Ethel and Zippo, as seen by their grand-nephew, Daniel. I’m not sure what’s going on here (there’s always at least one confusing story per anthology), but it involves transmogrification and buffalo, cheetahs, and other denizens of a game park near the aunts’ farm. Hirshberg’s lively, affectionate characterization of the two weird old women kept me much more interested than the ill-defined otherworldly elements.

“The Brink of Eternity” by Barbara Roden attains the lyrical heights of a prose poem in its depiction of an explorer obsessed with discovering an underearth nation through an access point in the North Pole. Cutting between book excerpts, third-person present narration, and letters, the multivocal story reminds me of the polar expedition frame in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, especially given the hallucinatory effects that the cold and isolation have on Wallace, the explorer. Not really fantastical, but definitely eldritch, Roden’s work creates a lasting impression of chilly melancholy.

Delia Sherman, known for her mannered, sly style in which she gently subverts old tropes, runs together Brontean romance and “The Fall of the House of Usher” in “The Red Piano,” in which a maidenly archeology professor rents a house with the stipulation that the unusual red piano inside should never be molested. Of course, said piano has a mystic link to a similar piano next door, just as our heroine finds herself romantically entangled with the possibly vampiric lord of the mansion next door, who is, of course, named Roderick. Sherman modernizes a Gothic romance with sumptuous prose. I like this story best of all in the book; then again, I have a weakness for Sherman’s work.

“Sleeping with Angels” by M. Rickert goes Poe-style by telling believable events in a memorably disturbing way. The story follows a young girl, distraught over the death of her younger sister, who befriends a scrawny, neglected girl with burn scars across her body. The burned girl, Annabel, clings to the main character, spinning tales about how her mother is a mermaid out of water. Though the main character cherishes her closeness with Annabel, Annabel’s possessiveness seems icky and ominous until we learn the pathetic and rather sobering reasons for her scars and her lies. Filtered through the consciousness of an upset pubescent, Rickert’s story captures the main character’s confusion in metaphorical phrases (Annabel is “the girl made of fire”) that make the story’s reality slippery, magical, and unpredictable. With this tale we conclude that the horror that humans inflict upon each other goes beyond whatever supernatural terrors our imaginations can dream up.

In “Shadow,” Steve Rasnic Tem writes in second person, where “you,” the hero, are a young woman barricaded in your house against a plague outside. Your Uncle Mark leaves you a video narrative describing how he constructed your safe house to withstand the sick people, but how, despite his best efforts, a barely perceptible shadow has been infesting his surroundings. It’s up to you to deal with it. “Shadow” tries to mount the tension too slowly for me to detect any increase therein, although I do like the ending for the assertive, decisive action taken by the main character.

“Truth and Bone” by Pat Cadigan tells of a family and their double-edged powers of “just knowing” things: where someone has been in the past 24 hours, when someone’s lying, etc. Young Hannah puzzles as her older relatives make ominous adumbrations about the downsides of their powers and how they can’t “interfere with the world.” She doesn’t really understand the ambivalent gift until she develops her own talent, with which she tries to save the mean bully who sexually harasses her. In her misguided crusade against fate, Hannah learns about her power’s limits and the true reason behind the family black sheep’s disappearance. It’s not a particularly uplifting story, but it is very sensitive and humane, especially since Hannah’s “just knowing” ends up being a metaphor for the mortality we must all come to face.

“The Reunion” by Nicholas Royle is about a couple attending the wife’s college reunion. It is told from the view of the husband, who notices that space and time in the hotel hosting the reunion seem to be warping, with slippage occurring between who people were back then and who they are now. Royle evokes the disorientation and sense of doubling that arise when one shuttles back and forth in time on the wings of memory, but he doesn’t seem to really do anything with that feeling.

Kaaron Warren’s “The Tell” draws on Poe’s tale about the madman and the famous tattle-tale heart. It is about a morbid curatorial assistant, Siri, who receives the unusual gift of a horsehair heart from a stranger on a train. The heart might have belonged to Poe, maybe not. Either way, it starts giving people nightmares and bringing calamity to Siri, who, after an accident, has horsehair dreams of a clothing shop where the items infect people’s minds, thanks to the horsehair heart. Disjointed, with a tone wavering uncertainly between realism and fairy tale, “The Tell” tries to form a coherent whole around the horsehair heart, but doesn’t really exploit the slimy insidiousness of the object in question.

“The Heaven and Hell of Robert Flud” by David Prill follows an encyclopedia salesman, Flud, to his last house call of the day to an isolated heartland farm where all the animals have their tongues cut out. Flud tries to leave, but something doesn’t want him to. Is it the old taciturn farmer or something supernatural? Prill draws on the terror inherent in a dilapidated, lonely farm and its hermit-like tenant without ever descending into stereotypes of scary, subhuman rednecks. Short and moody, this would translate well to a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode.

In the most visceral punch of horror in the volume, Kristine Katherine Rusch, like M. Rickert earlier, eschews supernatural stuff completely in “Flitting Away.” Instead, she focuses on a woman assaulted, nearly drowned and left for dead after date rape. In stark, horrible vignettes that capture the chill of the water, the grit of the dirt beneath her, and her puzzled panic at her immobility, Rusch’s protagonist pieces together her fragmentary memories, trying to recall what she did to suffer such misfortune. She wishes to flit away and escape the sheer physical pain of her body and the mental pain of her memories, but she forces herself into some semblance of wholeness anyway. Rusch’s prose here is like harsh flashes of strobe light, which, though painful, illuminate the ugly side of human nature that we’d rather suppress. Unsparing, downbeat, and vivid in its portrayal of a disoriented, discouraged, and profoundly pessimistic protagonist, Rusch’s story has an especially strong effect because something like it is happening now, not very far away.

In “Kirikh’quru Krokundor” by Lucius Shepard, anthropologist Jon and his ex-lover, the sexy pop academic, Nubia, explore St. Gotthard, an abandoned Moravian compound in the Andes of Venezuela. A team of graduate students accompany them. When Jon and others reach St. Gotthard, some people start disappearing. Then, regardless of their actual sexual interests, various members of the party feel compelled to screw each other. Jon begins to realize that the force behind these events may have exterminated the Moravians and might soon do the same to his group. I love a good abandoned fastness infested with a troubled crew as much as the next reader of adventure stories, but Shepard’s take suffers from sluggish exposition in which too much time is expending trying to make random hook-ups seem disturbing. Not until the end, when Jon sees the exhausting effects that possession by the sex-obsessed force can have on someone, do we really get a sense of something nasty going on. The silly proceedings beforehand don’t do justice to the end.

In “Lowland Sea” by Suzy McKee Charnas, the Red Sweat, a mutated form of Ebola, plagues the globe. Against this backdrop, flamboyant and charismatic movie star Victor and his entourage of groupies and servants retire to an isolated compound in northern Africa as the contagion rages around them. Miriam, one of Victor’s servants, watches Victor manage “his people” with great leadership skills, but his casual exploitation of her and the rest of his retinue disturbs him. Though Victor works hard to make his fortress impregnable, the inevitable occurs with Miriam’s help. Charnas’s pointed observations on celebrity worship and cultural imperialism give a satisfying retributive conclusion to yet another of the author’s consistently wonderful works.

This anthology goes out on a sly and dreamy note with John Langan’s “Technicolor.” Unusually framed as the lecture of a bored, supercilious college professor, this story connects Edgar Allan Poe to a series of weird monocolor paintings created by a living corpse (?) and intended to alter reality in increasingly weird ways. By making eldritch and nuanced paintings the subject of a text-only story, Langan starts off at a disadvantage, but his integration of a compendium of Poe knowledge and a compelling narrative thread works in his favor. Though the professor character delivers lots of (supposedly) historical data, his snarky tone keeps us interested as we try to parse whether the details are historically accurate or just semi-plausibly odd. Langan’s masterful creation of an immersive effect transmutes reality (at least for the duration of the story) so that the teacher is working his nefarious mojo on us!

Publisher: Solaris (Jan. 2009)
Price: $11.49
Trade paperback: 352 pages
ISBN: 1844165957