The Poe Papers

by Nancy Zaroulis

Book Overview

A macabre, terrifying thriller.-Library Journal A nightmare of sex, murder, and madness.-Kirkus Reviews Told with great power. . . . A stunning achievement.-The Boston Globe Nancy Zaroulis has a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• ISBN: B000GRETB8
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Hamlyn

Customer Reviews

Splendid; a diabolical delight

With the deceptive simplicity of art that is really art, Nancy Zaroulis has constructed a tale involving Edgar Allan Poe (whose name is curiously never mentioned) and his beloved "Annie"--Mrs. Charles Richmond--along with her daughter, who is named Lenore. The year is 1895. It is 46 years after Poe's death. The place is Lowell, Massachusetts. The narrator of the tale is a relatively young man, a connoisseur of the arts, both pictorial and literary, who sets out to visit a now elderly and secluded Mrs. Richmond with the idea of convincing her to allow him to peruse, publish, and possibly acquire "The Poe Papers" that he believes she has in her possession. His name too is never mentioned. Indeed he is an Edgar Allan Poe doppelganger of sorts somehow brought forward in time through supernatural fate. He is an obsessed and a compromised narrator, somewhat in the manner of some of Poe's compromised narrators--Montresor in "The Cask Of Amontillado" comes to mind; indeed Montresor is mentioned on page 246. Zaroulis's protagonist also reminds me a bit of Humbert Humbert from Nabokov's Lolita in that he inadvertently reveals his not entirely sterling character as he narrates the story. In the present case we see early on by his almost savage dismissal of a poor beggar girl, and later by his employment of various machinations and dishonesties in his effort to gain the confidence of the widow Mrs. Richmond and her daughter (the "lost Lenore"?), that he is a morally challenged man. Somehow, however, with deftness of intent and mastery of characterization and plot, Zaroulis manages--as did Poe and Nabokov--to persuade the reader to identify with and find some sympathy for the obsessed and eventually weak-willed "unreliable narrator." Zaroulis's technique may owe something to Henry James as well as to Poe. Her use of a quotation from the preface to James's "The Aspern Papers" suggests as much. Her careful foreshadowing of events so as to make them seem natural, almost inevitable, recalls the literary artistry of earlier times. Witness the unfortunate man who had come to Lowell previously seeking the Poe papers. We can guess at what he foreshadows. Witness the hellish artistry of Lenore so that we are given a glimpse of her character before we see her actions, allowing them to make reasonable literary sense. Witness the cat who scratches the protagonist. What can this foreshadow? The period piece feel of New England in the late 19th century created by Zarouli seemed to me to be fully authentic; but even more authentic is the feel of the late 19th, early 20th century novel that she has created. Indeed I was in some manner reminded of Henry James's friend, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome written a few years after the time of this novel with a similar setting. The Poe Papers combines easy reading with a certain understated elegance of style that I found myself admiring. Zaroulis knows well the old saying that easy writing makes for hard reading a