"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." -Groucho Marx

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Nevermore by Harold Schechter


Rating: 5.0

What it's about:
Harold Schechter, the brilliant author of the true-crime books Deviant and Depraved, brings us Nevermore, a novel about the father of mystery and horror fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, on the trail of a killer. You remember what the raven said, but Schechter takes Poe on dark and disturbing byways as he investigates the murder of an elderly widow. Hooking up with Congressman Davy Crockett, Poe finds more evildoings as a puzzle of murder and darkness comes together in 19th-century Baltimore. -taken from Barnes&Noble.com

My thoughts:
Nevermore is an enthralling mystery! I couldn't put it down. The story was great but it was the interaction between Edgar Allen Poe and Davy Crockett that made the story so fun. The chain of events and close calls that lead Poe and Crockett to the close of the case, are in the end, a source Eddie Poe uses to write his own stories. At the end of the novel, we find that Poe has used the incidents of the fire at the Asher house (Fall of the House of Usher), his suspension over a bottomless pit(The Pit and the Pendulum), finding a corpse under the floor boards(Tell-Tale Heart), and many more such adventures as material for short stories.

I am an enthusiastic re-reader of books and Nevermore is one I will visit forever more.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Good review. I don't remember a whole lot about this book only that I did enjoy it.

tina FCD said...

Sounds like my kind of book!