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I must admit to having a soft spot for Edgar Allan Poe. He was the boon companion of my adolescence. Whilst others of my generation were developing the herd mentality and lavishing their time on football, chopper bikes and the Bay City Rollers, I was poring over The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death. Call me underdeveloped, call me what the hell you like, but to my mind I was developing a taste for quality literature. And Poe is, whatever you may have gleaned about him from cheap movies and comic book adaptations, a thoroughly top-notch writer in the Romantic tradition.

He doesn't really fit comfortably into the classic Gothic genre, though many regard him as one of its late and finest flowerings. For me, Gothic means Ann Radcliffe and Matthew 'Monk' Lewis. It means wild landscapes, maidens in distress, magnificently evil villains, ghosts and ghouls, deserted castles in the mountains and haunted chambers. Poe's terrors are more psychological.

The House of Usher seems like a physical house, but it is really a tainted bloodline, reaching its diseased end in Roderick Usher, and a sick brain splitting down the middle. Madeleine Usher, buried alive by her neurotic brother, has more to do with Freud than with a penny dreadful. Poe's castles and dungeons, maelstroms and cities under the sea are like Kafka's Castle: in the mind, and all the more terrifying for that.

He draws heavily on the unconscious and is one of those in whom the divide between that and its conscious counterpart is a very permeable one, to say the least, and you can see how he had such an influence on Baudelaire and just about every modern writer of horror. But he was also the inventor of the modern detective story and wrote a good deal of poetry.

He was like a battlefield: he liked to think of himself as logical and calculating, but all the time, this great underground current of dark forces was heaving against his early Victorian world of science and progress and making life pretty difficult. He certainly suffered for his art, and it's just as well that he didn't want to achieve immortality simply through not dying, like Woody Allen.

But his influence since his death has been enormous. Rachmaninov wrote 'The Bells' in homage and, more recently, Roger Corman made films loosely based on his tales and starring the likes of Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. He has inspired rock albums and graphic art and had more than his share of bad imitators.

Poe's is a world of strange lights and deep shadows, but I find it comforting as well as unnerving. I can remember where and when I read most of his tales and poems and, when I read them now, the past comes gently tapping at my own chamber door.

Learn more about this author, David Elliott.
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