In The Shadow Of The Master: Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

On Edgar Allan Poe BY T. JEFFERSON PARKER

Picture my suburban living room in Orange County, California, 1966: an orange carpet, pale turquoise walls, white Naugahyde furniture, white acoustic ceiling, a rabbit-eared black-and-white TV, and a wall-to-wall bookshelf six feet high and stuffed with books.

The bookcase was filled mostly with nonfiction-history and politics and outdoors adventure and travel. But we had Robert Louis Stevenson, and we had Jack London, and we had Edgar Allan Poe.

“Mom, why do we have Poe?” I asked her as a sixth-grader.

“He understood the guilty conscience. Read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and you’ll see what I mean.”

So one evening, a school night, after my homework was done and my half-hour on the TV was over, I turned on the reading lamp and settled into the white Naugahyde recliner and opened Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

I read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and saw that Mom was right. I suspected that Mr. Poe also understood some things about insanity and murder-how else could he write in the voice of a madman who remembers to use a tub to catch the blood and gore when he “cut[s] off the head and the arms and the legs” of the old man he has murdered and places the parts beneath the floorboards?

I was intrigued. I was exploring a foreign mind. I was transfixed.

The next night I read “The Black Cat.” And the night after that “The Cask of Amontillado,” where I was confronted with what I still think is the best opening line I’ve ever read:

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

I read all of those stories over the next six months. Some I loved, and some unsettled me, and some went far over my young head.

But I took them all into my young heart. What they taught me was this: there is darkness in the hearts of men; there are consequences of that darkness; those consequences will crash down upon us here in this life. They taught me that words can be beautiful and mysterious and full of truth.

These are the things I learned from Poe as I sat in the white recliner in my Orange County living room as a twelve-year-old, and these are the things I write about today.

That volume sits beside me now. There are still small red dots beside the stories I read that first month: “Ligeia,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Masque of the Red Death.”

When I open it, I can see that room of forty years ago, and I can remember my rising sense of foreboding and excitement when I read the first line of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

I still read those stories. I still love them, and they still unsettle me, and some of them still go over my no-longer-young head.

T. Jefferson Parker was born in L.A. and grew up in Orange County, California. He has worked as a waiter, an animal hospital night watchman, and a newspaper reporter. His first novel, Laguna Heat, was published in 1985. Fourteen books later, he is ridiculously lucky to have received two Edgar Awards for Best Mystery. He is also the proud owner of a brick salvaged from Edgar Allan Poe’s last New York apartment, which occupies a place of honor on the Parker family room hearth.