Edgar Allan Poe once said that he wrote everything for effect. To this day, his stories and poems still flavor our perception of the macabre. He didn't coin the phrase, "It was a dark and stormy night," yet when you think of Poe, doesn't that description come all too easily to mind? When you read Frankenstein or Dracula, how faithful is your imagination - or the movie - to the stories as they were written? In your mind's eye, isn't it always night, with groaning winds, banging shutters, creaking doors...and maybe a thunderclap or two, just for good measure? Don't you secretly wonder whether behind some wall, a forgotten lover may have been buried alive, or perhaps in the next scene, a razor-sharp pendulum might swing from the ceiling? Poe was to gothic horror what The William Tell Overture is to The Lone Ranger...it's virtually impossible to hear one without picturing the other.

     And Poe knew of which he wrote. His life reads like one of his stories - tragic, but infused with black humor. His fondness for brandy and various controlled substances often left his sensibilities, shall we say, borderline. At one time, he lived across the street from a Manhattan fire station...good thing, too. The story goes that while he was writing The Fall of the House of Usher, firemen had to periodically peel him off the wallpaper. More than one student of literature has wondered whether Poe didn't really hear that raven call out, "Nevermore!"

     If you were to say Edgar Allan Poe was a loose cannon, you would get no argument from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where believe it or not, he was cadet. He washed out, of course. Despite the official version of the story, it wasn't poor grades, drunkenness, or even gambling that got him expelled. But when the order came down for cadets to line up for inspection in dress boots and sword, and that was all he wore...

     Quoth the commandant...

Acknowledgments: 15

© Russ Brown, 1998