Back in the day, I used to read lots of horror anthologies. Few stories stayed with me like E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sand-Man (1816). It's a weird, complex story (as are all of Hoffmann's fantastic tales) featuring a character named Coppelius. The man is an evil presence in the young hero of the story's life, being involved in some kind of mysterious alchemical experiments with the boy's father. Ultimately, Coppelius is responsible for the death of the father and the boy comes to associate the ugly man with the nursery fables of the Sand-man.
     At one point, the boy's nurse describes the Sand-man to young Nathaniel.

"Oh! he's a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out  of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty little boys' and girls' eyes out with them."

     Nathaniel's run-in with Coppelius goes like this:

"Eyes here! Eyes here!" cried Coppelius, in a hollow sepulchral voice. My blood ran cold with horror; I screamed and tumbled out of my hiding place onto the floor. Coppelius immediately seized me. "You little brute! You little brute!" he bleated, grinding his teeth. Then, snatching me up, he threw me on the hearth, so that the flames began to singe my hair. "Now we've got eyes--eyes--a beautiful pair of children's eyes," he whispered and, thrusting his hands into the flames he took out some red-hot grains and was about to throw them into my eyes.

[image error] (E.T.A. Hoffman's sketch of Coppelius)   
     The inspiration for My Clockwork Muse springs as much from Hoffmann as Poe. The connection is not altogether casual. You can clearly hear Poe in the passage above and Poe was often accused of merely mimicking the German Romance writers, of whom Hoffmann was the preeminent exemplar. These accusations, which were intended to minimize Poe, prompted the writer to respond: "Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul."
     My use of Coppelius in My Clockwork Muse is my homage to Hoffmann--which is what one writer always says when he steals from another. I don't think E.T.A. would have minded. I have treated Coppelius well, perhaps even in a way Hoffmann would have approved.
     As one of the characters in My Clockwork Muse says of Coppelius: "Where Coppelius has been, you'll find some strange shit." (Just so you know, in the context of my novel, that phrasing is not as anachronistic as it seems. You'll just have to trust me on that.)
     While Hoffmann agrees, he puts it a different way:

"The fearful and hideous thought arose in my mind that he [Coppelius] must be the Sand-man; but I no longer conceived of the Sand-man as the bugbear in the old nurse's fable ... but as an ugly spectre-like fiend bringing trouble and misery and ruin ... everywhere he appeared."

     Yeah, just what I was saying: Strange shit, indeed.
     There are more connections between Poe and Hoffmann, but I'll save that for another day.