I’m a big fan of Mike Flanagan. His next series on Netflix is The Fall of the House of Usher, coming some time later this year. It will be based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is having a bit of a moment on Netflix right now with Wednesday and The Pale Blue Eye also invoking him, so now seems like a good time to revisit Poe’s work.
Poe sometimes quotes other languages without providing English translations, so it’s a good idea to have your phone handy while reading to translate for you. He sometimes blanks out the year or character names for some reason. I also noticed he uses lots of adverbs. (Supposedly, good writers don’t use a lot of adverbs, but I’m not convinced that’s true.)
The narrators of his stories often go unnamed. I wonder if this is because the reader is supposed to think Poe is the viewpoint character? This seems especially likely in stories where the narrator’s name is given as P. or P__. Some of his narrators marry their cousins, like Poe himself did.
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