"I cannot think of any other author", said Harold Bloom of Edgar Allan Poe, "who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical." But for each writer who has disparaged him, from Henry James to Yeats, Lawrence to Auden, there is an array of works that bear his influence: stories and novels not only by horror specialists like HP Lovecraft and Stephen King, or by writers of detective fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle, but by Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, Eudora Welty, Nabokov and Bolaño. Like the obsessions that so often lead to the annihilation of Poe's narrators, his influence cannot be escaped.
When Poe began writing stories in earnest in the early 1830s, the gothic genre, by far the most popular in the periodicals of the day, was, in artistic terms, distinctly hackneyed. Responding to sniffy charges of "Germanism", in the preface to his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Poe averred that "terror is not of Germany, but of the soul", and one of the primary reasons for the longevity of his stories lies with their ability to present stock scenarios (live burial, the doppelgänger, possession) in ways that tap into far more profound wells of horror than most gothic authors – or horror writers generally – locate. These atmospheres transcend his sometimes turgid prose, and the finales described as the "campy, floozy 'Boo!' business at the end", by offering destabilising visions of madness, obsessive love, cruelty and endemic menace.
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