Edgar Allan Poe in Popular Culture - Fiction

Fiction

• "Revenant", a short story by Walter de la Mare, first published in The Wind Blows Over, 1936, in which Poe listens to a modern lecture on his life & works, then takes the lecturer to task for making facile judgments.
• "When It Was Moonlight", a short story by Manly Wade Wellman which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Unknown, has Poe pausing in the composition of The Premature Burial to investigate a genuine local case, only to find himself faced with a vampire.
• "The Exiles" (September 1949) is a short story by Ray Bradbury, included in his collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man (1951), in which Poe is an entity who lives in a refuge on Mars. He is erased from time when his last work is destroyed on Earth.
• "The Gentleman From Paris", a short story by John Dickson Carr, first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (April 1950), features an unidentified Poe, sitting in a bar in New York, solving a Dupin–like mystery for the title character. Poe disappears before he can receive a substantial reward six months before his death.
• "Richmond, Late September, 1849", a short story by Fritz Leiber, first published in Fantastic, February 1969, in which Poe meets a woman claiming to be the sister of Charles Baudelaire but who may in fact be Death. Poe died October 7, 1849, in Baltimore.
• "The Man Who Collected Poe" by Robert Bloch in which a fanatical Poe collector proves to have resurrected (collected) the real Poe and has him locked in his back room writing new Poe-esque stories. It was filmed as an episode of the film Torture Garden, which Bloch wrote.
• A Singular Conspiracy (1974) by Barry Perowne; A fictional treatment of the unaccounted period from January to May 1844, in which Poe, under an assumed name, visits Paris in a failed effort to join French volunteer soldiers headed to aid Poland against Russia, instead meeting the young Charles Baudelaire and designing a conspiracy to expose Baudelaire's stepfather to blackmail, to free up Baudelaire's captive patrimony.
• The Last Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe: The Troy Dossier (1978) is a novel by Manny Meyers which features Poe aiding the New York City police department in 1846 to solve a pair of murders.
• "In the Sunken Museum", a short story by Gregory Frost, first published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, May 1981. An account of Poe's famous last days and his enigmatic last utterance.
• "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" (1982) by Angela Carter, a short story first published in Interzone, and later collected in Black Venus, traces, with dark humour, the origins of the many of the themes in Poe's later fiction to his very early years living with his theatrical mother.
• "No Spot of Ground", a 1989 short story by Walter John Williams, features Poe, having survived his harrowing experience in Baltimore, leading Southern troops during the American Civil War. This is not as odd as it seems at first, since Poe did have West Point experience (though brief), and both sides were desperate for men with that kind of background. In the Battle of Gettysburg segment, Poe replaces General James L. Kemper in Pickett's Charge. Like Kemper, Poe is wounded, but unlike Kemper fights on with Robert E. Lee until near the end of the war.
• The Man Who Was Poe (1989), a juvenile novel by Avi, features a young boy named Edmund befriending C. Auguste Dupin, who is actually Poe himself. Edmund and "Dupin" solve several mysteries in Providence, Rhode Island.
• The Hollow Earth (1990), a novel by Rudy Rucker in which Poe explores the inhabited center of the world
• The Black Throne (1990), a science fiction novel by Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen features Poe as one of the main characters alongside a parallel world alter ego, master sergeant Edgar Perry (Poe's alias when he was in the Army). The novel quotes Poe's poems and uses them as inspiration for the plot; one scene is similar to "The Pit and the Pendulum."
• Route 666 (1993), a satirical cyberpunk novel in the Dark Future series by Kim Newman (writing as Jack Yeovil), features a ramshackle Eddy Poe chanelling Cthulhu.
• The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Stephen Marlowe (1995) concentrates on Poe's last week alive and has C. Auguste Dupin trying to solve his disappearance
• Nevermore (1995) by William Hjortsberg, features Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle solving a series of murders, which eerily re-enact the stories of Poe.
• The Murder of Edgar Allan Poe (1997) by George Egon Hatvary, features Poe's fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin befriending the author and subsequently investigating his mysterious death.
• Nevermore (1999), The Hum Bug (2001), The Mask of Red Death (2004), and The Tell-Tale Corpse (2006) novels by Harold Schechter. Nevermore depicts an intelligent, crime-solving Poe teamed up with the adventurous man of action, Davy Crockett.
• Lenore: The Last Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe (2002) is a novel by Frank Lovelock that fictionalizes Poe's final days before his death. The story is presented as a delirious dream Poe has while in the hospital. C. August Dupin makes an appearance along with Lenore, depicted as a woman in love with a runaway slave named Reynolds. Lovelock weaves Poe's own letters and works into the story; direct quotes are acknowledged in bold, italicized text with notes on their origins.
• The American Boy (2003) by Andrew Taylor an historical mystery story featuring Poe as a schoolboy in England.
• "Edgar Allan Poe's San Francisco: Terror Tales of the City" (2005) by Joseph Covino Jr, a derivative psychological gothic horror suspense thriller perfectly faithful to the style and tradition of Edgar Allan Poe set in contemporary San Francisco.
• The Poe Shadow (2006) by Matthew Pearl, a novel which revisits the strange events surrounding Poe's death.
• A fictionalized younger Poe was a main character in Louis Bayard's The Pale Blue Eye, published in May 2006. Poe investigates a mysterious death during his time at West Point. Bayard emphasizes the young Poe's drinking habits.
• Poe plays an indirect part in the Supernatural spin-off novel Supernatural: Nevermore, where protagonists Dean and Sam Winchester investigate a series of murders in New York based on Poe's stories, Sam deducing that the killer is attempting a resurrection ritual to bring Poe back to life to learn the truth about his death (Although Sam notes that the ritual is a fake and wouldn't work anyway).
• The Blackest Bird (2007)by Joel Rose featured Poe as a main character. The novel correctly follows some of Poe's history in writing and in his personal life.
• A young Edgar Allan Poe, alongside Gullivar Jones, is the main protagonist of the novel Edgar Allan Poe on Mars (2007) by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier.
• The Joyce Carol Oates book Wild Nights! (2008) tells fictionalized versions of the last nights of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway.
• Edgar Allan Poe is first mistaken for a vampire and then befriended by Abraham Lincoln in Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2010).
• The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe is often referred to in Robert Rankin's The Brentford Trilogy books; during "The Brentford Triangle", he is summoned to Earth by local postman Small Dave, but becomes angered at Dave's attempt to control him and his conviction that Dupin was a dwarf when Poe never intended such.
• Finding Poe (2012) by Leigh M. Lane is a fictionalized account of Poe's final days, speculating the role his unfinished work "The Light-House" may have played in his mysterious death.