In The Shadow of Poe: Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination

The third entry in IDW’s “In the Shadow of...” series with noted scholar and award-winning editor Leslie S. Klinger (The New Annotated Dracula, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The Annotated Sandman) again presents a host of classic genre tales worthy of rediscovery by modern readers. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is often cited as America’s first writer to achieve true international recognition (in his lifetime he was more popular in France than in the States). His Gothic poems, literary essays, and evocative stories have been canonized in mainstream literature, taught in both public schools and universities. Les Klinger collects and annotates a lush collection from the Gothic writers who influenced Poe, and the writers who were influenced by him. Here we briefly visit the birth of the Gothic literary tradition in the mid-1700s — a popular genre that Poe reinvented as a commercial vehicle for his own original voice — as well as significant writers whose works adapted Poe’s ideas and themes to their own artistic goals. The authors featuted in this collection include Horace Walpole, Sir Walter Scott, E.T.A. Hoffmann, F. Marion Crawford, Guy de Maupassant, Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert W. Chambers, W. W. Jacobs, Arthur Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany.

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