Poe's Children: Connections between Tales of Terror and Detection

by Tony Magistrale, Sidney Poger

This study traces Edgar Allan Poe’s contribution to the Gothic tradition and his invention of the detective tale. It explores the connections between these genres in British and American writers influenced by Poe, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Harris, and Stephen King. This book also examines women writers strongly influenced by Poe, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton. The last chapter of the volume considers films – in particular, the Roger Corman Poe series , Chinatown, Seven, and Blade Runner – that connect the horror and detective genres.

148 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1999

About the author

Tony Magistrale is the author of three books of poetry: What She Says About Love, winner of the 2007 Bordighera Poetry Prize, which was published as a bilingual edition in 2008; The Last Soldiers of Love (Literary Laundry Press, 2012); and Entanglements (Fomite Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Over the past two decades, Magistrale's twenty-plus books and many articles have covered a broad area of interests. He has published on the writing process, international study abroad, and his own poetry. But the majority of his books and articles have centered on defining and tracing Anglo-American Gothicism, from its origins in eighteenth-century romanticism to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture, particularly in the work of Stephen King. He has published three separate interviews with Stephen King, and from 2005-09 Magistrale served as a research assistant to Mr. King. Accordingly, a dozen of his scholarly books and many published journal articles have illuminated the genre's narrative themes, psychological and social contexts, and historical development.