#king pest

[weepingwidar]

Alberto Martini (Italian, 1876-1954) - Illustration for the story King Pest by Edgar Allan Poe (1905)

[charnel-grounds]

Alberto Martini (1876−1954), King Pest

illustration for the works of Edgar Allan Poe, c. 1905-09

[badmusicisisgoodmusic]

doodles of random things i like,,,,

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

YOU READ KING PEST?? omagahhhh !!!!!

u dont have to answer this ask but i just wanna let u know i fw you

Yup, I read a lot of Poe as a 9 y. o. Even made the Pest family in Sims 2. They had a coffin selling business. But I didn't reread much since then so eventually forgot the story existed.

[noovorous]

Reading prose of Edgar Allan Poe for the first time is such a beautiful experience. Reading short stories in order they were arranged in in a publibaction gave me first Berenice, Ligeia, Morella, The Fall of The House of Usher and the likes one gets a strong feeling of prevalent themes of death, being buried alive, transcending death in one way or another, all wrapped in a dark, gloomy and misty atmosphere.

Later King Pest mixes this mood with vulgar comedy while The Angel of the Odd and The Spectacles are full on comedic (The Spectacles are one of the funniest pieces of fiction I have ever read).

Then you read The Gold-Bug, The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter all of which show you the skill of a brilliant mind (in the latter three cases mind of Monsieur Dupin) uncovering a mystery.

Something that surprised me the most was the sheer range of those stories, the mastery over both comedy and tragedy. To experience that range for the first time is to be overwhelmed by literary genius of the author.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination - art by Arthur Rackham (1935)

[bashfulrayarts]

Based on "King Pest" story by Edgar Allan Poe

[brightbeautifulthings]

"By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only,"

[tw: character death, cannibalism, racism/xenophobia]

To no great surprise, I went a little off-schedule, missed my September reading, and decided to just finish the collection in October. It's not the spooky Poe stories I was hoping for in Halloween month--mainly just scary how bad it all is. "The Oblong Box" is a decent start to these last handful of stories, with an actual plot and a creepy twist to the ending, and "Three Sundays In A Week" is an interesting riddle, if not that strong narratively. It's a return to the ridiculous with "The Duc de L'Omelette," "The Devil in the Belfry," "Lionizing," and "The Spectacles," a silly tale about a guy who mistakenly tries to marry his own great-great-grandmother. "King Pest" tries and fails to make a comedy out of plague. Stress again how not funny Poe is.

I was dreading "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym." It's over a hundred pages long, and since Poe struggles to carry a narrative for even ten pages, I was worried I was in for a hopeless slog. It's not great, but it's not as bad as I was expecting either. We follow Pym through his misadventures at sea, punctuated by long and boring details about ships and carrying cargo. (He can't steer a boat at the beginning of the story, but apparently at some point he becomes an expert.) A dog who is never mentioned before appears to play an important role, and then is never mentioned again. It gets incredibly dark in the middle, but there's surprisingly little character development. Pym succumbs to cannibalism, sees his best childhood friend die, and suffers no apparent emotional or psychological damage for it; those are never mentioned again either. The story grows hideously racist/xenophobic toward the end, with a tedious setup to paint the native population of an island as the most horrific and duplicitous monsters imaginable. (Dude, you ATE one of your shipmates. Should you really be throwing stones right now?) For some reason, the story isn't finished, leaving Pym in a tight spot, though we know (?) from the framing story that he didn't die there. Was it a serial that got canceled? Did Poe not know how to write himself out of that corner? Was he as bored with it as I was? Worst, did he always mean to leave it like that?

Poe's poetry is a little easier to work through than his prose. I love "The Raven" with its lilting rhymes and dark message, and "Annabel Lee" is very pretty, both ubiquitous in popular culture. I also liked "Dream-Land," "Al Aaraaf" (where Ligeia makes another appearance), and "Alone." Most of the poetry has pretty simple rhyme schemes, the subjects mainly love and loss. There's an excerpt of an unfinished play, "Politian," included here as well, but it didn't make much of an impression on me. I'll be pulling together an overall review sometime soon. For now, it's a relief to be finished.