I certainly remember one thing about discovering Poe in my teen years and that was the physical-ness of his stories. As previously noted, part of the effectiveness of his horror is the sensory description of the body under stress...the violation of the sanctity of the "body suit" being the worst fear, i.e., eyes poked out, cuts to body, enormous stress like heavy weights, burning, ghastly smells of the crypt. Wes Craven says the secret to great horror is our fear of having our "body" violated in some permanent manner. I remember one of Poe's short short stories, I think it was about a clock in a clock tower; and the main character, from his point of view, climbs up to get a view of the village from the clock tower. Unfortunately he sticks his head through an opening in the clock face and remains too long; the giant metal clock hand moves next to his neck and traps him there. Then follows the extended awareness of the character feeling the gigantic minute hand cutting into his neck...slowly we feel him dying, a slow guillotine in effect, and then to gross the reader out...we feel the head cut through (one of his eyes pops out of the socket from the pressure) and it falls to the pavement and for a fleeting second...as I remember it from long long ago...we see the square and up above the relentless march of the clock hand before fade out. I remember after reading that story I had a headache...I felt like one of those pop-eye goldfish. For a teen boy...even despite the sometime formal, stilted 19th century language, this was great stuff! Wow...I knew that most of the fiction assigned at school gave me a headache...but this stuff, discovered by me alone, now this was a headache well worth the pain!
Jim Stallings: (Peruse published fiction ):
http://www.jimstallings.com
All books available through B&N also.
"Literature is humanity's deep gossip."
