Poe - [Anthology] Read online

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  Poe

  Edited By Ellen Datlow

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  Introduction Ellen Datlow

  Illimitable Domain Kim Newman

  The Pickers Melanie Tem

  Beyond Porch and Portal E. Catherine Tobler

  The Final Act Gregory Frost

  Strappado Laird Barron

  The Mountain House Sharyn McCrumb

  The Pikesville Buffalo Glen Hirshberg

  The Brink of Eternity Barbara Roden

  The Red Piano Delia Sherman

  Sleeping with Angels M. Rickert

  Shadow Steve Rasnic Tem

  Truth and Bone Pat Cadigan

  The Reunion Nicholas Royle

  The Tell Kaaron Warren

  The Heaven and Hell of Robert Flud David Prill

  Flitting Away Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kirikh’quru Krokundor Lucius Shepard

  Lowland Sea Suzy McKee Charnas

  Technicolor John Langan

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  introduction

  Edgar Allan Poe(January 19, 1809—October 7, 1849) lived a relatively short, unhappy life but during it he produced some of the world’s most recognizable poetry and stories. Orphaned before the age of two, he became estranged from his foster father in his teens and became an alcoholic who had difficulty keeping a job. He married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm (who probably inspired much of his fiction and poetry), only to see her sicken and die of tuberculosis in her twenties. His drinking was exacerbated by her death, and only two years later he himself died in Baltimore, four days after being found wandering the streets, delirious and in clothing other than his own. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published anonymously in May 1827. Although his first love was always poetry, he wrote stories, reviews, essays, and commentaries, in order to support himself and Virginia. He worked as assistant editor for theSouthern Literary Messengerin Richmond, Virginia, then atBurton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and finally in 1841 was appointed assistant editor ofGraham’s Magazine,both in Philadelphia. Some of his work was collected in the two volumes of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. It was during this period that he wrote what many consider the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Both “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” were also written while Poe was living in Philadelphia. The publication of his poem “The Raven” in the February 1845 issue ofThe American Review and subsequently inThe Raven and Other Poemsthe same year finally brought him the recognition he had long desired.

  For the reader unfamiliar with Poe’s work, one can’t go wrong picking up a copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination—it can be purchased in inexpensive editions with or without illustrations.

  In honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s Bicentennial in 2009, I commissioned our intrepid contributors to write stories inspired by Poe. I only specified that I did not want pastiches. I asked each writer to tell me in advance what work of Poe’s was to be riffed on and then write an afterword discussing his or her choice. Although I discouraged Poe being used as a character in the stories, a couple of writers came up with such ingenious uses of Poe within their stories that I was delighted to include them.

  So we have nineteen stories and novelettes that have been influenced by Poe’s work ranging from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” (three of the latter, all quite different from each other) to one of Poe’s essays, his poetry, and even an unfinished fragment of a story. The periods, styles, and backgrounds are varied. The subject matter and themes sometimes address contemporary concerns and fears. The contributors are from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, and just about evenly split male-female (all inadvertent).

  I’ve always been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe’s prose and poems and have appreciated the movies made from his work—as dumb as some of them have been. Kim Newman starts off the anthology using his immense filmic knowledge to create a tale “celebrating” these mostly cheapie efforts to take advantage of public domain fiction. John Langan finishes with a story that includes, among other things, a postmodern exegesis of one of Poe’s most famous stories.

  Each author contributes an afterword explaining from which of Poe’s works they’ve taken inspiration. Although the reader can check out these afterwords in advance, I urge you not to. It may spoil the surprise, the shock, and, yes, the horror these authors have in store for you.

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  Kim Newmanwas born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to University near Brighton, and now lives in Islington (London).

  His most recent fiction books include: Where the Bodies Are Buried, The Man From the Diogenes Club, and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieveas Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include: Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), and a host of books on film. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, scripting radio documentaries, role-playing games, and TV programs. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the British Fantasy Award. His official website, “Dr Shade’s Laboratory,” can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com .

  I chose this story to start the anthology because although its tone is lighter than most of the other stories, it serves to introduce the reader to many of the filmed versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s work... until it gets a little... weird—even for Poe.

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  Illimitable Domain

  By Kim Newman

  Okay, you could say it was my fault.

  I’m the one. Me, Walter Paisley, agent to stars without stars on Hollywood Boulevard. I said, “Spare a thought for Eddy,” and the Poe Plague got started...

  It’s 1959 and you know the montage. Cars have shark fins. Jukeboxes blare The Platters and Frankie Lyman. Ike’s a back number, but JFK hasn’t yet broken big. The commies have put Sputnik in orbit, starting a war of the satellites. Coffee houses are full of beards and bad poetry. Boomba the Chimp, my biggest client, has a kiddie series cancelled out from under him. Every TV channel is showing some Western, but my pitches for The Cherokee Chimp, The Monkey Marshal of Mesa City, and Boomba Goes West fall on stony ground. The only network I have an “in” with is DuMont, which shows how low the Paisley Agency has sunk since the heyday ofJungle Jillian and Her Gorilla Guerrillas (with Boomba as the platoon’s comedy relief mascot) and The Champ, the Chimp, and the Imp (a washed-up boxer is friends with a cigar-smoking chimpanzee and a leprechaun).

  American International Pictures is a fancy name for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff sharing an office. They call themselves a studio, but you can’t find an AIP backlot. They rent abandoned aircraft hangars for soundstages and shoot as much as possible out of doors and without permits. At the end of the fifties, AIP are cranking out thirty-forty pictures a year, double features shoved into ozoners and grindhouses catering to the Clearasil crowd. They peddle twofers on low-budget juvenile delinquency (Reform School Girl with Runaway Daughters!), affordable science fiction (‘Terror From the Year 5,000 with The Brain Eaters!), inexpensive chart music (Rock All Night with The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow!), cheapskate creatures (I Was a Teenage Werewolf with The Undead!), frugal combat (Suicide Battalion with Paratroop Command!), or cut-price exotica (She-Gods of Shark Reef with Teenage Cave Man!). When Jim and Sam try for epic, they hope a marquee-filling title—The Saga of the Viking Wom
en and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent—distracts the hot-rodders from sub-minimal production values and a ninety-cent sea serpent filmed in choppy bathwater.

  The AIP racket is that Jim thinks up a title—say,The Beast With a Million Eyesor The Cool and the Crazy—and commissions lurid ad art which he buries in hard-sell slogans. He shows ads to exhibitors, who chip in modest production coin. Then, a producer is put on the project. Said producer gets a writer in over the weekend and forces out a script by shoving peanuts through the bars. Someonehas to direct the picture and be in it, but so long as a teenage doll in a tight sweater screams on the poster—at a monster, a switchblade, or a guitar-player—no one thinks too much about them. Sam puts fine-print into contracts which makes sure no one sees profit participation and puffs cigars at trade gatherings.

  Roger Corman is only one of a corral of producers—Bert I. Gordon and Alex Gordon are others—on AIP’s string, but he’s youngest, busiest, and cheapest. After, to his mind, wasting half his budget hiring a director named Wyott Ordung on a 1954 masterpiece called The Monster from the Ocean Floor, Roger trims the budgets by directing most of his films himself. He seldom does a worse job than Wyott Ordung. Five critics in France and two in England say Roger is more interesting than Cukor or Zinnemann—though unaccountablyIt Conquered the Worldmisses out on a Best Picture nomination. Then again, Mike Todd wins for Around the World in 80 Days. I’d rather watch Lee Van Cleef blowtorch a snarling turnip from Venus at sixty-eight minutes than David Niven smarm over two hundred smug cameo players in far-flung locations for three or four hours. You don’t have to be a contributor to Cayenne du Cinema or Sight & Sound to agree.

  After sixty-seventy films inside four years, it gets so Roger can knock ‘em off over a weekend. No kidding. Little Shop of Horrors is made in three days because it’s raining and Roger can’t play tennis. He tackles every subject, within certain Jim-and-Sam-imposed limits. He shoots movies about juvenile delinquent girls, gunslinger girls, reincarnated witch girls, beatnik girls, escaped convict girls, cave girls, Viking girls, monster girls, Apache girls, rock and roll girls, girls eaten by plants, carnival girls, sorority girls, last girls on earth, pearl-diver girls, and gangster girls. Somehow, he skips jungle girls, else maybe Boomba would land an AIP contract.

  The thing is everybody—except Sam, who chortles over the ledgers without ever seeing the pictures—gets bored with the production line. Another week, and it’s Blood of Dracula plus High School Hellcats, ho hum. I don’t know when Roger gets time to dream, but dream he does—of bigger things. Jim thinks of bigger posters, or at least different-shaped posters. In the fifties, the enemy is television, but AIP product looks like television—small and square and black and white and blurry, with no one you’ve ever heard of wandering around Bronson Cavern. Drive-in screens are the shape of windshields. The typical AIP just lights up a middle slice. Even with Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Amazing Colossal Man, and The She-Creature triple-billed, kids are restless. Where’s the breathtaking CinemaScope, glorious Technicolor, and stereoscopic sound? 3-D has come and gone, and neither Odorama nor William Castle’s butt-buzzers are goosing the box office.

  Jim or Roger get a notion to lump together the budgets and shooting schedules of two regular AIP pictures and throw their all into one eighty-five minute superproduction. Together, they browbeat Sam into opening the cobwebbed cheque book. This time, Mike Todd—well, not Mike Todd, since he’s dead, but some imaginary composite big-shot producer—will have to watch out come Oscar season. So, what to make?

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  In England, they start doing horror pictures in color, with talented actors in starched collars and proper sets. Buckets of blood and girls in low-cut nightgowns are included, so it’s not like there’s art going on. Every other AIP quickie has a monster in it, so the company reckons they’re expert at fright fare. There’s your answer. Roger will make a classy—but not too-classy—horror. Jim can get Vinnie Price to star. He’d been in that butt-buzzing William Castle film for Columbia and a 3-DHouse of Wax for Warners, and is therefore a horror “name,” but his career is stalled with TV guest spots on debatably rigged quiz programs or as fairly fruity actors touring Tombstone on Western shows. After Brando, well-spoken, dinner-jacketed eyebrow-archers like him are out of A pictures. What Jim and Roger don’t have is a clue as to what their full-color, widescreen spooktacular should be about. They just know Revenge of the Crab Monsters or The Day After the World Ended won’t cut it.

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  Enter Walter Paisley, with a Signet paperback of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. No, it isn’t altruism—it’s all about the client.

  Boomba’s out of work and eating his weight in bananas every single day. Bonzo and Cheetah have a lock on working with Dutch Reagan and Tarzan, so my star is unfairly shut out of the town’s few chimp-friendly franchises unless he’s willing to do the dangerous vine-swinging, crocodile-dodging stunts those precious primates want to duck out of. Therefore, I’m obliged to scare up properties suitable as vehicles for a pot-bellied chimpanzee. I ponder a remake of King Kong,with a chimp instead of a gorilla, but RKO won’t listen. I pitch a biopic of Major Sam, America’s monkey astronaut, but that goddamn Russian dog gets all the column inches.

  In desperation, I ask an intern who once had a few weeks of college about famous, out-of-copyright stories with monkeys in ‘em, and get pointed at “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Okay, so, strictly, the killer in that yarn is an orangutan not a chimpanzee—but every film version casts a guy in a ratty gorilla suit, so Boomba is hardly wider of the author’s original intent. I know of AIP’s horror quandary, and a light-bulb goes on over my head. I dress Boomba up in a fancy suit and cravat and beret for the Parisian look and teach him to wave a cardboard cutthroat razor. I march the chimp into Jim and Sam’s office just as Jim and Roger are looking glumly at a sketch artist holding up a blank board which ought to be covered with lurid artwork boosting their break-out film.

  Tragically, Boomba compromises his employment prospects by crapping his velvet britches and grabbing for Sam’s foot-long cigar, but my Poe paperback falls onto the desk and Roger snatches it up. He once read some of the stories, and thinks he particularly liked “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Sam objects. The kids who go to AIP pictures have to study Poe in school and will therefore naturally hate him. But Jim remembers Universal squeezed out a couple of Poe pictures and racked up fair returns back in the Boris and Bela days. Then, Sam—who gives every appearance of actually having read “The Fall of the House of Usher”—says you can’t make a horror movie without a monster and there’s no monster in the story. “The house,” says Roger, eyes shining, “the house is the monster!” Jim and Sam look at each other, thinking this over. Boomba is forgotten, chewing the cigar. Then, management buys Roger’s line. The house isthe monster.

  Important issues get settled. Is there a part for Price? Yes, there’s someone in the falling house called Roderick Usher. Is there a girl? Roderick has a sister called Madeline. Paging through the paperback, they discover Poe doesn’t say Madeline isn’t a teenager in a tight sweater. I suggest the thin plot of the eighteen-page story would be improved if a killer chimp escaped from the Rue Morgue and broke into the House of Usher to terrorize the family. No one listens.

  Jim and Roger run with “The Fall of the House of Usher.” They happily read out paragraphs in Vinnie Price accents. The sketch-artist covers his board with a falling house, Vinnie lifting a terrified eyebrow, a buried-alive babe in a tight shroud, coffins, crypts, skeletons, an atomic explosion (which gets rubbed out quickly), and slogans ripped from Poe prose. “He buried her alive... to save his soul!” “I heard her first feeble movements in the coffin... we had put her living in the tomb!” “Edgar Allan Poe’s overwhelming tale of EVIL and TORMENT!”

  I see my slice of the deal vanishing along with Sam’s cigar. Eddy is dead and long out of copyright, so there’s no end for him. This cheers Sam up, since he’d been all a-tremble
at the prospect of having to buy rights to some horror book from some unwashed writer.

  So, just when it would take a steam-train tostop AIP making The Fall of the House of Usher, I mention I am the agent for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and can easily secure permission—for a nominal fee—for the use of the author’s name, which they have registered as a trademark. For a few moments, the room is quiet and no one believes me. Sam is skeptical, but I tell him the reason Poe’s middle name is so often misspelled is to evade dues payable to the EAPSoB. He mulls it over. He swallows it, because it makes sense to him. He’s ready to argue for going with Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Asher as a title before Jim and Roger shout him down. Sam doesn’t care about critics, but little slivers of Jim and Roger do, so they’re ready to strike a deal on the spot. I have a pre-prepared contract, which needs crossings-out as it’s for a monkey as actor rather than an august body as trademark-leaser, but will still do.

  As soon as I’m out of the office, I found the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and start paperwork on trademark registration. It turns out I’m not even the first in the racket. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, or their heirs, have beaten me to it. The deal may not be 100% kosher, but AIP’s check clears. Probably, they just want to shut me up, since I’m theoretically responsible for bringing them the property. Hey, it’s my drugstore paperback. They offer me an “associate producer” credit, but forget to include it on the film. Maybe it’s lost in the five minutes of swirling multicolored liquids tacked on after the house has burned down and tumbled into the tarn. But, from then on, I’m part of the Poe package.