Some books are for a particular audience, and this is one. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe, like me, will be interested. When my professor of Freshman English in college gave us a choice of American writers for a paper, I chose Poe. She had a rule that no two students could do a similar paper, but she made an exception for him with one student addressing his short stories and another his poetry. Since I had chosen him first, she said I could take the short stories. She was surprised and the other student was thrilled when I told her I preferred his poetry. She didn’t know my mother had read “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” to me before I could read them for myself. Naturally, I was interested when Net Galley offered an ARC of a book about his death.
In A Mystery of Mysteries, Mark Dawidziak sets the tone for his search for the cause of death of Edgar Allan Poe before he begins his narrative with a beginning quote from Poe’s works:
The breeze – the breath of God – is still
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy – shadowy – yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token –
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
He begins his account with Poe’s passing from this life on an appropriately stormy night on October 7, 1849 when he was only forty years old, adding that nobody knows the precise cause. He spends the rest of the book alternating between the last months of Poe’s life and his decease. Speculation about causes include syphilis, alcoholism, rabies, murder, or some combination of factors. The circumstances of his death would be appropriate for one of his own horror stories. The author takes a look at the many accounts and assesses the reliability of widely divergent pictures of Poe himself as well as his death. While a neat conclusion is missing, the information will fascinate fans of Poe’s work. I found the time switches distracting but probably could have solved that by taking closer note to the dates at the beginning of each chapter.
In recent years, a fellow Poe fangirl with fabric art skill sent me a quilted postcard with a raven. The dark bird is looking down from the bulletin board above my writing desk and leaving that post nevermore.