My head was resting on the interior frame of a small SUV, behind the driver’s seat, parked outside an outlet mall in California. I held a book that I can say without a doubt, has influenced who I have become today. Not to say that I am mad… I was 15 years old when I read Poe’s short story, The Tell Tale Heart. It’s a quick-paced tale of terror that begins with the confession of a cold-blooded murder. I’d read various poems from Poe earlier on, and I could have honestly called

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see.” Our protagonist here, whilst on a venture through the southern stretch of France, finds himself just miles away from a personally much-lauded location: the Maison de Sante. Private madhouse. A place flown famously throughout the airs of the medical community due to its unorthodox treatments, rehabilitations. The system of soothing. This system, although still strict at its parameters, acted as a better angel fo

The historical context of Edgar Allan Poe is always worth noting when discussing his work. The United States was plagued by Tuberculosis and chattel slavery. This comes across in his poetry through a variety of motifs. Do you remember reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (or, perhaps, having it read to you)? I believe this particular poem is a not-so-subtle commentary on race, racial purity, and the transmission of property (among other things) within a tr

Edgar Allan Poe. The Tomahawk Man. Progenitor of what some may deem as horror, the psychedelia and the psychosis and the wherewithal of the human condition, writ upon the pages of burgeoning, and troubling, times—whilst going through his own troubling times, mind you: rifling through the waning cupboards of poverty, circumstances orphaning, abandoning, coming to awful grips with the loss of both his Wife and Mother at the early hands of tuberculosis, struggling the th

One of the biggest lessons that Scooby-Doo taught me is that there is safety in numbers. Shaggy, either out of wisdom or fear, knew that greater than anybody else in the group. He experienced camaraderie and lack of it and applied that knowledge of both situations to create his understanding. In many ways, I relate to him. His fears, though silly, tended to be rational, based on his personal experience. As fans of the horror genre, I believe we can all understand that. We ten