As Halloween approaches, what better way to celebrate the season when the spectral
boundaries of the Kingdom of the Spirits of the Dead touch briefly with the mystical
edges of the Domain of We the Living than to invoke the battered and hellishly bedeviled
soul of Edgar Allan Poe to guide us in communication between (his) ghostly and (our)
ghastly planes of existence.
Poe invented the “detective” story and was an early father of “sci-fi”, and he was also an
extraordinary poet, but he is best known for his Gothic tales of mystery and abject horror –
nearly all of them anchored in the apprehension of an impending cruel and unnatural death.
Poe had an inventive genius like no other in his imaginings of all the unfortunate ways
one might leave this realm. Adding in his paranoia over his own mortality stoked his stories
to a fevered pitch. His was, in the 1840s, the voice of the emerging modern American, fearful
of the on-rushing future, while struggling to escape the pull of the superstitious past, and
by that struggle driven into a state of neurotic forebodings often crossing over into insanity.
It is ironic and fitting that the master of fearful ruminations of ugly deaths should himself
die a death shrouded in mystery, succumbing, at only age 40, to the symptoms of rabies (the
current best theory), possibly from the bite of one of his own beloved cats.
and horrifically evocative works of art inspired by the deathly imagination of the master himself.
Only the most fearful, fiendish and uncanny deviations on deviantART can do justice to illustrating the diabolical death dramas hatched in the fevered mind of Edgar Allan Poe that still haunt us generation after generation. Just to make this all the more terrifying, marioluevanos and I would love for a devilish detachment of deviants to pick only the most exquisitely terrifying deviations from the entire dA website that are fitting visual explications for the appropriate Poe “death categories”. Just find the perfect deviant artwork(s) for your favorite Poe story or stories, and let us know which matching “death box” your choice(s) should be displayed in. We will then post the deviations to this article in each category leading up to Halloween.
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