cover image Poe's Lighthouse: All New Collaborations with Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's Lighthouse: All New Collaborations with Edgar Allan Poe

Christopher Conlon, . . Cemetery Dance, $40 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-58767-128-9

Conlon asked 23 top authors to complete Poe's story fragment "The Lighthouse," and the mixed results suggest that Poe and his posthumous collaborators probably work best independent of one another. A few entries are Poe homages, including John Shirley's "Blind Eye," which capably echoes Poe's old-fashioned gothic prose, though its plot is frankly modern. George Clayton Johnson's "A Literary Forgery" resurrects Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin in a caper that hints creatively at the origins of several Poe story plots, while Paul Di Filippo's "Days of Other Light" is an interplanetary adventure that commands sympathy for a tortured Poe-like artist underappreciated by his extraterrestrial culture. Most of the contributors try to work Poe's prose into their narratives, but their stories show little interest in his concerns as a writer. The book ends with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's witty "A New Interpretation of the Liggerzun Text," a tale of a future society's misinterpretation of Poe that unintentionally critiques most of this volume's contents. (Apr.)