Nevermore

Here is an historical novel about Edgar Allan Poe which is also a Poe pastiche. The main plot is about Poe teaming up with Davy Crockett (!) in Baltimore to solve a series of gruesome murders. The theme is the contrasts between the robust, vulgar natural man and the sensitive, romantic intellectual. The author, who also writes non-fiction 'true crime' books, is clever enough not to make one of the partners superior to the other; they form a coniunctio oppositorum.

Schechter uses the common method of writing an historical novel about an author: he proposes that the authors fictions from that time were based on actual events. You can identify the stories used here by hints dropped pretty broadly in the book.

Schechter attempts to imitate Poe's style: the book is narrated by Poe. He does not capture Poe's brilliance (who could?) but he does get the showy, patchy erudition and florid grandiloquence of the autodidact. He also shows Poe's self-image as a Southern Gentleman with a prickly sense of honor and as a brilliant, struggling, ambitious young author.

The resolution of the mystery is ingenious in that it does not draw on Poe's stories but it is compatible with known facts of Poe's biography. ( )

This book was awful. Not to be confused by the novel of the same name by william hjortsberg. THAT one was good. ( )