Dead Brides: Vampire Tales

by Edgar Allan Poe, Jeremy Reed (preface)

Dead Brides contains the vampire cycle of live stories, written between 1835 and 1842, which in many ways forms the nucleaus of Poe's prose work: Berenic, Montella, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Oval Portrait. In these classic tales, Poe investigates the vampiric nature of human relationships, including love and lust both normal and incestuous, and develops his theme to observe the vampiric qualities inherent in the creative or artistic process.

Vampirism, with its terrible energy exchanges and lesions, is ultimately Poe s analogy for a love that persists beyond the grave—an all-consuming passion that knows no peace until an undead reconciliation is effected.

With a preface by Jeremy Reed, Dead Brides is illustrated by the lithographs of the Symbolist Odilon Redon, who was compelled to reproduce the most insane images from his unconcious through the inspiration of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and other dangerous writers of his age.

Genres: Horror, Vampires, Fantasy, Anthologies, Short Stories, Classics

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1999

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of five EAP short stories with a vampiric theme. Introduction by Jeremy Reed.

Berenice
Morella
Ligeia
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Oval Portrait

[Suki St Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Poe, who was known for his silence, has most of his characters scream."-- Afterword

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want poe to write about me like he does these women

[Michelle]

typical gloomy Poe... I liked it but it isn't a favourite

[El Gingero · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pleasant collection of tales that Poe fans will get a massive kick out of but they're by no means comparable to some of his best work. The foreword by H.P. Lovecraft is a great touch however.