So I was thinking I enjoyed this book a lot. I think it's clearly established that Edgar Allan Poe is a master of story-telling suspense, and I always like returning to my favorites. And the book itself is superb, it has a nice retro look to it and features the Harry Clarke illustrations, which seriously bump up the already high creepy factor of the stories significantly.

But the shtick of this particular edition of Poe stories is what didn't really work for me. It's put out the Mystery Writers of America, which seems fitting because their annual award is called the Edgar, for obvious reasons. A number of successful members of this group were asked to contribute pieces on Edgar Allan Poe. And with some few exceptions (Nelson DeMille, Laura Lippmann), these short writings add very little. Overwhelmingly, they're insubstantial. And this is so consistent that I strongly suspect the editor and whoever else was working on this project made the requests in such a way that lead people to believe it was okay to toss off a few paragraphs and call it a day. I feel as though they must have been asked "hey, could you write something? Just a little something? Don't feel you have to spend much time on it, anything you jot down would be just fine. You know, in your spare time." My general feeling after reading most of them, even from authors I very much like, was "wow, talk about phoning it in." I think fewer essays of more substance would have been a better way to go.

Grade: A for Poe, clearly. C for almost everyone else. The authors' essays felt much too obligatory.
Recommended: There are more complete works of Poe, but this is an especially nice-looking volume with good hand feel to it.

2009/46 ( )

A collection of Poe’s best, with little asides written by some modern writers. Poe shines so brightly (or maybe darkly) in these tales that these little musings seem like a distraction at times. I would have preferred fewer of these, and more actual stories. ( )