I was maybe ten at the time and a frequent library goer. The hometown library in the town where I grew up was nothing more than a converted farm house with an addition added on to the back and the librarians who worked there surely knew my brother and me by name. For as often as I was in there, my most vivid memory involves not finding what I was looking for.
I remember it was summer, it was sunny, and warm and my brother and I were trying to kill off a few more hours and stave away boredom in the middle of one of those long, drawn out summer afternoons. So we went to the library because we could get stuff there for free and it was air-conditioned. To this day, I have no idea why I asked for what I asked for, but I had a very specific subject in mind.
Up to the counter I strode, put my hands on the desk in front of the librarian, and asked, “Where can I find a book on Jack the Ripper?”
I think you know where this conversation went and our librarian didn’t waste time in going there. I was too young to be asking about such material, but they did have some books on ghosts that I might like. So what I ended up with was not Jack the Ripper, but a book of Edgar Allen Poe. My brother and I passed the day in our town park reading Poe’s stories to each other.
More after the jump…
"The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Raven," "The Cask of Amontillado," and so forth. I'm sure I didn't catch all of the complexities of Poe's stories (how could I at that age?), but I got the big picture stuff: guy kills neighbor and can't stop hearing the dead guy's heartbeat, spooky bird haunts lonely guy late at night and reminds him of his dead wife, guy is entombed alive. It was to be the start of my fascination and unbridled love for genre fiction. The darker, odder, or more fantastic, the better.
And so my journey and love affair with all things dark fantasy/SciFi and horror began. Poe was my gateway drug, you might say, and I've been feeding that addiction ever since. The novels are fun, as they force the main characters into "survival mode" situations, and I love reading to find out how they cope, how they survive, or if they do. But it's in the genre's short fiction that you can find some truly unsettling and entertaining gems. I'm not the kind of person to enjoy formulaic fiction, so the coin-toss of survival present in dark fiction shorts really appeals to me. Will they survive, will they not, are they forever damned, will they find redemption? You just never know until you arrive at the end (and sometimes, not even then). It's a rush, a reader's high, and if you're familiar with Poe, then you know his works establish that all bets are off when it comes to his characters' fate.
Fun!
So, I thought, what better to give on Halloween than a story? I know, I tried to find a way to give you candy instead, but bandwidth required for that was mind-blowing!
So I'm giving you a reading of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. Happy Halloween.
If you want a copy of this recording, you can scare one up by clicking here.
Please pardon the quality - I had a bang up version of this poem ready for you, complete with music and a few sounds, but either Sound Forge or my computer ate that one late last night and this was a rushed re-recording.
Great essay. And what better way to celebrate Halloween than with "The Raven." Quoth the raven, "Eat my shorts!" (Damn "The Simpsons" and their influence on my memories of classic literature!)