nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre

I was expecting this book to be full of Poe pastiche but was pleasantly surprised to find that it was mostly stories inspired by and influenced by Poe's works. With the exception of Robert Lopestri's "Street of the Dead House", which tells "Murders in the Rue Morgue" from the POV of the orangutan, the works I liked the least were the ones that stuck closest to Poe's original stories, namely Nancy Holder's "Annabel Lee", which retells Poe's poems from the title character's POV, and Tanith Lee's "The Return of Bernice", which has Bernice coming back as a vampire. Despite the few clunkers, I really enjoyed this collection.

Favorite stories: "Street of the Dead House" by Robert Lopestri, "The Masques of Amanda Llado" by Thomas S. Roche, show more "The Deave Lane" by Michael Jecks, "The Drowning City" by Loren Rhoads", and "The Inheritance" by Jane Petersen Burfield. show less

Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles bring us: nEvermore!: Tales Of Murder, Mystery & The Macabre - Neo-Gothic Fiction Inspired By The Imagination Of Edgar Allan Poe. This collection was like discovering Poe for the first time all over again. And I'm shocked to find myself stating such a thing.

Poe is one of my most beloved authors, first discovered as a very young man, and that was some time ago. I expect most of us who love Poe share the experience of discovering this at a very young age. After all, if one has ever taken an English class, then one has been introduced to Poe. And also like me, I expect most people have found it very hard to recreate that joy of first discovery. Not that I haven't discovered many great authors and their works show more since, because I certainly have (some have stories in this volume), but Poe's works have a very unique and special feeling to them that I've never found anywhere else. Perhaps some of this comes from the fact that I was so young when I discovered him, at least this is what I always thought up until now.

There have been any number of Poe theme'd anthologies over the years, and a near infinity of authors whose publishers trumpeted them as the next Poe. So I am always extremely wary when something new comes along invoking the name of this great writer. Needless to say, I approached this anthology with great caution. However, the line-up of contributing authors is such a list of luminaries that I had to give it a try.

Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles have been loose on the reins with the authors. Each story starts with an introduction to the story by the author where they explain their own experience of Poe and why they've chosen a particular aspect of that experience to create their story. I think this way of doing things has created a magic formula of sorts. Every reader has their own very personal experience of Poe, and by letting these authors tap into their own personal experience, the result is a collection that feels deeply intimate. I believe it is this shared experience that invokes the anthology reader's own personal history with Poe. It felt like I was reading a newly discovered cache of lost Poe stories, like a continuation of what I first felt so many years ago.

I will make no attempt to breakdown the stories or to rate and rank them. Dissection would be a disservice, perhaps a sacrilege. There is only one way to read this anthology: jump in, submerge, return to that misty and half-forgotten realm of youth and experience the joy of discovery once more. I can't recommend these stories highly enough. show less

There's a piece by 16-year-old Margaret Atwood! Eeep!

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through Library Thing's Early Reviewers program. Trigger warning for rape and other forms of violence, as well as transphobic and homophobic bullying and suicide.)

I consider myself a bit of a Poe fangirl. Not to the tune of being able to reenact entire scenes from The Tomb of Ligeia or keeping a raven as a pet; but as in the first (and only!) gift my father every personally picked out for me was a leather-bound collection of Poe's complete works (I'm vegan now, but I keep it around for sentimental reasons) and I might, one day, name one of my rescue dogs Annabel Lee. It's fair to say that I'm interested, but not obsessed. show more

So when I spotted nEvermore! in Library Thing's July batch, it was Poe's name that grabbed by attention - but Margaret Atwood's that really sealed the deal. If I'm a bit of a Poe fangirl, then I'm freaking Annie Wilkes when it comes to Atwood. I exaggerate, but not by much.

Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles, nEvermore!: Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre features twenty-two stories that are inspired by Poe; contain elements from Poe's oeuvre; and/or are retellings of his stories. Some are more modern takes on Poe, while others employ similar language and have the same weirdly sinister vibe. If you're a hardcore Poe fan, probably you'll get more out of the stories than the casual or non-fan; there's a lot of name-dropping, as well as references to real, historical events from Poe's life. However, I wouldn't limit the audience just to those familiar with Poe; many of the stories are solid enough to stand on their own. Bonus points: Each story is prefaced with a brief introduction by the author(s), for added context.

And fellow Margaret Atwood fans? Definitely give it a spin, if only for "The Eye of Heaven" - written by a sixteen-year-old Margaret Atwood (!). Naturally she's humble about her contribution ("'The Eye of Heaven' might not be very good, though it's good enough for a sixteen-year-old") but it's among my favorites. I would pay to read her MadLibs, though, so grain of salt.

As with many anthologies, it's a bit of a mixed bag; there are some truly wonderful stories here, a few I didn't really care for, and a large chunk that fall somewhere in the middle. (I tried to avoid any major spoilers in the story summaries, but please skip them if you'd rather read the collection with virgin eyes.)

"A Rather Scholarly View of Edgar Allen Poe, Genre-Crosser" by Uwe Sommerlad - The title pretty much says it all. DNF, but mostly because I wasn't in the mood to read a non-fiction essay about Poe. Just give me the stories please!

"The Gold Bug Conundrum" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - A wealthy video game developer buys a dilapidated estate on a Caribbean Island located in the Bermuda Triangle, as it's rumored to be the inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug." That, and hidden pirate treasure! Needless to say, the transaction doesn't end well. 2/5 stars. The beginning reads like an HGTV script, and the climax is rather underwhelming.

"Street of the Dead House" by Robert Lopresti - When hunters murder his mom, the young orangutan Jupiter goes to live with the Professor, who meddles with his brain (presumably, to make him smarter) and teaches him to sign. A visiting sailor from France, taken with the friendly primate, kills the Professor and kidnaps Jupiter, hoping to sell him to a zoo in Paris. When Jupiter refuses to cooperate, the two hatch a plan to steal an elderly lady's gold so that Jupiter can pay his fare back to Borneo. 5/5 stars. Jupiter gives me all the feels, you guys.

"Naomi" by Christopher Rice - The narrator's niece, a young trans woman, committed suicide after the bullying at school became too much to bear. Yet her ringtone - a bouncy pop number that triggered the worst of the abuse - lives on, driving her tormentors to take their own lives as well. 5/5 stars.

"Finding Ulalume" by Lisa Morton - The narrator's sister Anna went missing in Weir Forest when they were just twelve and thirteen years old. Decades have passed, and the narrator - now a search and rescue volunteer - has been summoned to the forest to find a missing team of surveyors. 4/5 stars.

"Obsession with the Bloodstained Door" by Rick Chiantaretto - As a child, the narrator becomes lost in a sinister, mysterious mansion; in his many years of wandering, he's only encountered one locked door that he cannot breach. It becomes his obsession. 3/5 stars.

"The Lighthouse" by Barbara Fradkin - It's 1942 and World War II rages on. 18-year-old Sammy, an aspiring writer, is sent to help his uncle maintain the lighthouse on Quirpon Island (Newfoundland). One foggy night, Uncle Nat goes missing - and a strange soldier (a Nazi deserter?) washes up on the shore. Is this a case of life mimicking art? The story features a frustratingly abrupt ending, just like the original. 4/5 stars.

"The Masques of Amanda Llado" by Thomas S. Roche - A disgruntled music critic lures his ex-boss - a postmodern frat boy from a failed tech startup - to his basement warehouse with the promise of a rare Amanda Llado album. Needless to say, none of us will miss the dudebro. 5/5 stars.

"Atargatis" by Robert Bose - Star's great-grandfather passes away, leaving her a locket that bears the face of a mermaid - and contains a mysterious key. His last word to her? "Atargatis." 5/5 stars.

"The Ravens of Consequence" by Carol Weekes and Michael Kelly - An old hermit is plagued by memories of a family he never had. Or did he? 4/5 stars.

"Annabel Lee" by Nancy Holder - A retelling of "Annabel Lee" from Annabel's perspective, this story also incorporates some elements from Poe's other works. 5/5 stars.

"Dinner with Mamalou" by J. Madison Davis - The CEO of the Makadam Energy (evil megacorp incarnate!) agrees to a sit-down dinner with Mrs. Bertrand, aka "Mamalou," the matriarch of the backwater town she calls home. On the menu: a discussion of the six deaths in St. Germain Parish since the company began fracking there. Also: revenge! 3/5 stars. The villains are a little too cartoonish for me.

"The Deave Lane" by Michael Jecks - An archaeologist's worst nightmare comes true when she's called to investigate a body found buried in the mors - and stumbles right into the midst of a pagan death cult. 3/5 stars.

"133" by Richard Christian Matheson - The Resurrectionist's Guide to the Death Penalty. 3/5 stars.

"Afterlife" by William F. Nolan, Jason V. Brock, and Sunni K. Brock - Explores "the idea that Poe could become trapped in the physical space of his own letters" - specifically, those thought to be forged by Rufus Griswold and burned by Charles Leland. 3/5 stars.

"The Drowning City" by Loren Rhoads - How to outwit a siren using modern technology. The futuristic look at Venice is both lovely and heartbreaking. 3/5 stars.

"The Orange Cat" by Kelley Armstrong - An abused cat refuses to cast his one good eye away from his cruel owner - even after he's been euthanized and had his bashed in as part of a double murder. Gabriel Walsh (of Armstrong's Cainsville series) is on the case. 4/5 stars.

"The Inheritance" by Jane Petersen Burfield - Annabel the raven exacts her revenge on the boys responsible for her death - from beyond the grave. 3/5 stars.

"Sympathetic Impulses" by David McDonald - In trying to uncover how a captured spy withstands torture, an Inquisitor unwittingly becomes the means by which he does so. 3/5 stars.

"Asylum" by Colleen Anderson - A vamp with a taste for the crazies happens upon an asylum that's been taken over by the lunatics. 3/5 stars.

"The Return of Berenice" by Tanith Lee - A retelling of "Berenice" in which the titular bride is actually a vampire - and Egaeus has condemned his cousin to a fate worse than (un)death by stealing her most valuable asset. 3/5 stars.

"The Eye of Heaven" by Margaret Atwood - A young man is haunted by the eyes of those he's killed - fishes and family members alike. 5/5 stars. It's Margaret Fucking Atwood, yo!

http://www.easyvegan.info/2015/08/19/nevermore-edited-by-nancy-kilpatrick-and-ca... show less

The first hour alone with the grand staircases and rooms that spoke of royalty had been a childhood fantasy come to life. My footsteps and boyish chuckles echoed throughout the halls. If I listen closely I can still hear them echo, as if they will echo eternally, although they have grown fainter; ghostly. The house parrots my cries for help too; they sound even more menacing mingled with the boyish laughter.

In the essay which comes before the first story, Poe is described thus: Poe, the horror writer. Poe, the poet. Poe, the critic. Poe, the inventor of the detective story. A major force in the development of the science fiction genre. A master of the Gothics. The godfather of psychological thrills. The obstetrician of symbolism. A show more jester. A philosopher. So this isn't one of those themed anthologies where the theme constricts the authors and it contains some very different stories.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, so I will just say that my top three are Street of the Dead House, The Drowning City and Asylum, while the best title award goes to The Ravens of Consequence. show less

This anthology has an even more diffuse effect than Ellen Datlow’s Poe. Both allowed a variety of stories in, not all of a fantastic nature. Poe was a more protean author than generally realized. (A point Uwe Sommerland’s opening article, “A Rather Scholarly View of Edgar Allan Poe, Genre-Crosser", makes well.) He wrote in a variety of tones and styles and more than just the macabre and mystery stories he is most remembered for.

The connection many of the stories have to Poe is not obvious apart from the authors’ foreword though some are quite explicit takeoffs on Poe’s work.

Lest you get bored, let’s start us with the best.

The razor-wielding orangutan of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” gets to tell his side of show more things in Robert Lopretsi’s “Street of the Dead House”. He’s one of those science experiments gone wrong. A large mansion on the shores of British Columbia, a large family, and a family secret are the heroine’s inheritance in Robert Bose’s effective “Atargatis”. An archaeologist’s involvement in a police investigation and a pagan cult result in the oh-so-Poe ending of burial alive in Michael Jecks’ “The Deave Lane”.

Loren Rhoads places her series heroine Alondra DeCourval in Venice to put a stop to a rash of suicides in “The Drowning City”. Tanith Lee’s “The Return of Berenice” ruminates on the follow up to Poe’s odd tale of obsession and dental horror, “Berenice” -- moody and effective.

The inspiration for Thomas S. Roche’s “The Masque of Amanda Llado” is obvious, but I appreciated the modern update of the tale with a dot.com entrepreneur paying the role of the fortunate one.

It’s grounded on an idea also used in the collection’s worst story in the anthology, Christopher Rice’s unimaginative “Naomi”. Don’t think of this as virtue signaling on Rice’s part. We need a word for unimaginative cheerleading for the latest egalitarian or charitable fad. "Virtue echoing" maybe. Its only saving feature is the idea of a viral pop tune on a cellphone.

The rest of the stories are the middling ones.

That the treasure of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” was real is the premise of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “The Gold Bug Conundrum”. It seems to be suggesting great mysteries – we even get a Lovecraft reference – but the dialogue strains under carrying the plot of a very rich game developer exploring an abandoned seaside resort and his more practical and unimpressed brother-in-law. That dialogue also has too many room descriptions in it.

“Finding Ulalume” from Lisa Morton is promising until the end, an exploration of the ghost-haunted Weir Forest that claimed the narrator’s 13-year-old sister. But it wobbles at the end when trying to incorporate material from the eponymous Poe poem.

Rick Chiantaretto’s “Obsession with the Bloodstained Door” has some nice, surrealistic images in a story of a boy wandering in a house for years – but that’s all it is apart from what seems to be a reference to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

No, Barbara Fradkin’s “The Lighthouse” is not at attempt to finish the story of that name Poe started shortly before his death though others have tried that and there is a whole anthology of such stories. Its lighthouse is on Newfoundland in 1942. Like the Chiantaretto story, it ends on an enigmatic and inconclusive note.

The old amnesiac killer idea is taken up in Carol Weekes’ and Michael Kelly’s “The Ravens of Consequence”. Nancy Holder's "Annabel Lee" is sort of a cento exploring the world of the Poe poem though it also works in references to gothic works as well. J. Madison Davis’ “Dinner with Mamalou" is a biter-bitten tale in the Louisiana bayou with the biter being the CEO of a fracking company and the biter of the second part being an old healer and leader of a community that is hampering his company’s drilling.

“Death is too good for them” is a sometimes heard comment on executing serial killers, and Richard Christian Matheson’s “133” explores that idea. The notion that a writer’s essence can be bound to the paper he writes on, that “writing and breathing are entwined with life and death” is bound to appeal to writers, especially late in their life, and this was one of the last stories William F. Nolan worked on, here co-authored with Jason V. Brock and Sunni K. Brock. But the story’s execution, mingling details of Poe’s life with his spirit after death, didn’t pack that much punch.

“The Orange Cat” is Kelly Armstrong’s updating of Poe’s “The Black Cat” and features her series character Gabriel Walsh, a sleazy defense attorney whose client wants to kill a cat. Cousins vex the protagonist of Jane Petersen Burfield’s “The Inheritance” after the death of her aunt. David McDonald’s “Sympathetic Impulses” is a gimmicky tale of Gothic torturers. Colleen Anderson’s “Asylum”, a translation of Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”, is hampered by its modern day setting which undercuts the suspension of disbelief.

Finally, Margaret Atwood’s description of her “The Eye of Heaven” as “not very good, though it’s good enough for a sixteen-year-old” is accurate. Still, as a look at the first murders of its serial killer narrator, it works. show less

This is an anthology of short stories, all inspired in some way by Edgar Allen Poe. Some have directly based their story on one of Poe’s works, some are retellings and others have just been inspired by his gothic style. As always in anthologies, there’s a mixture in terms of quality and style, although I never really found anything dragged, which isn’t always the case in these sorts of books. The opening story, The Gold Bug Conundrum by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, was a bit disappointing as a start to the book, since it seemed fairly interesting until it came to an abrupt end with nothing having happened, but thankfully that’s not typical of the rest of the book. Street of the Dead House by Robert Lopresti is a highlight, retelling show more The Murders in the Rue Morgue from the perspective of the infamous orangutan, tying in with the original story while still creating something new in the process. Similarly, Nancy Holder’s Annabel Lee retells Poe’s poem from the perspective of Lee herself, and manages to incorporate a few of Poe’s other works into the story in the process. Naomi by Christopher Rice is an interesting and more supernatural take on The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masques of Amanda Llado by Thomas S. Roche spins a completely new story using elements of The Casque of Amontillado, while also having a pun on it for a title which always gets points in my book. And I particularly liked Kelley Armstrong’s The Orange Cat, which added some welcome humour amongst the gothic stories, taking on Poe’s The Black Cat as a modern legal case (incorporating a character that’s apparently from a series of books by the author.)

Most of the rest of the stories didn’t really stand out much, and there isn’t really one particular truly exceptional story, but it’s a solid collection with nothing terrible either. Any fans of Poe are likely to find something enjoyable here, and each story comes with a brief introduction by the author of where the inspiration came from, which is a nice touch. show less

There are two excellent reasons to pick up this anthology: Tanith Lee and Margaret Atwood. That isn't to say that there aren't several other authors here well able to draw in your attention -- Kelley Armstrong, Nancy Holder, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro are names of note -- but these are my particular favorites. And truly, this anthology is very well done, a homage to the master. I loved the prefaces that each author gave to their stories; they gave a wonderful little intimate glimpse of why each author so appreciated Poe.

Four stars, plus one additional star for the excellent dedication:

And to Tanith Lee who, like Poe, deserves to be remembered.

And do note the charming author blurbs:

Make sure your belt is done up good and tight when you show more read nEvermore!. It’s very embarrassing to have your pants scared off. —Linwood Barclay

A side-note -- Following this, missing my Lee stories (RIP, May 2015), I went to Amazon and purchased an expanded edition of her marvelous Red as Blood collection of fairy-tale retellings regardless of it having the single most grossly inappropriate cover artwork of any book I have ever seen. (Have you seen it? Go HERE. Tell me it doesn't look like some misguided attempt to draw in the MRAs and seduce them into reading feminist stories. I was irked enough to go through some trouble to replace my ecopy's cover with a jpeg of the Whelan original, but I really ought to talk about that in a separate review.) show less