THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610280195
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 84 lines
Surely the appropriate holiday inn of the Halloween season is the titular abode of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:
I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium.
What mingled elements of Munster Mansion and the Bates Motel!
When director Roger Corman was trying to get his low-budget film of the story financed, wary backers demanded: But where's the monster? The house, Corman explained patiently, is the monster.
Readers will recall the venerable pile collapsed at the end of the story and sank into the moatlike tarn around it.
Now, in Robert Poe's Return to the House of Usher (Forge, 284 pp., $22.95), the dessicated digs, like an exhibit in a Stephen King theme park, have been restored:
How dreary it seemed, a great barracks of a house rebuilt on the property just where the original mansion had stood. I could see that same tarn, or pond, that E.A. described in his story, a black sheet of water that reflected the stone walls of the nineteenth-century house and glistened with a peculiar silvery sheen. The pond must be polluted, I thought. . . .
Things have happened at the old homestead in this imaginative updating of the horror classic. Owner Roderick Usher, world-renowned gerontologist, has established the place as a sanatorium, with his sister Madeleine as chief psychiatrist. Located south of Richmond, seven miles outside Crowley Creek, Va., the otherwise arthritic joint is jumping.
It seems that former patients at Usher House, certified dead and buried, have been observed walking the halls and grounds at night. . . .
``I've been kidded all my life about wanting to be a writer and being possibly related to Edgar Allan Poe,'' said Robert Poe, 29. ``Initially I tried to get out from under the name of Poe and submitted things with pseudonyms. But finally I decided to go for it, to embrace my heritage instead of running from it.''
The first fruit is Return, the engaging and disturbing testimony of yet another descendant of Edgar, John Crowley Poe, a bourbon-drinking ``rational modern man'' with a degree in English from the University of Virginia and a job writing for the small-town Crowley Sentinel.
It's a veritable Poe-pourri.
``I'm happy the book is out,'' said Robert. ``That's an affirmation. Now I'm anxious to see how the public will react - will they accept it?
``Will they accept me?''
They should. The new book, unlike its ancestor, has a sense of humor. And the boyish Robert, though he shares his distant relative's brooding eyes, is a veteran Navy electronics technician with less hair and more global experience than Edgar had.
He lives in a bright townhouse in the Landstown Lakes section of Virginia Beach. There's a pond close by but little danger of any adjacent architecture sinking into it. And instead of specters, the area abounds in kids, yard sales and recycling bins.
This Poe grew up the son of an Air Force captain, on and off military bases across this country and England. Robert, for the record, hates the taste of whiskey. He wears jeans, sneakers and white socks off-duty and really shares but one passion with the immortal Edgar:
A love for words.
``I've been interested in writing since I was 6 years old,'' Robert said.
His second novel, a sequel titled The Black Cat, will be out next year, in plenty of time for another Halloween.
Meanwhile, also in keeping with the season, comes the trade paperback of Ray Bradbury's netherworldly The October Country (Ballantine, 307 pp., $10). The veteran science-fiction and fantasy author provides a dark compendium of tales set in ``that country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.''
Typical entry: ``Skeleton,'' in which a man finds himself at war with his own bones.
Just keep the porch light on, and don't look behind you. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communications professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Robert Poe will sign copies of his book, ``Return to the House of
Usher,'' on Saturday, Nov. 16, from 2 to 3 p.m., at Barnes & Noble,
4485 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach by CNB