More than twenty years after his first encounter with ‘Kleist in Thun’, BEN WINCH continues to be dazzled: ‘each time I gaze into that mirror—a mirror-within-mirror, and therefore, if the angle’s just right, a particularly dazzling one—I see a different face. ‘
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL examines Roger Corman’s gothic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: ‘House of Usher is perhaps Corman’s most interesting adaptation in that, departing quite drastically from Poe’s narrative, it still captures the excess of Poe’s gothic aesthetic. Retaining the histrionics of Poe’s story, Corman’s House of Usher represents Poe’s imaginative hyper-reality with vivid, saturated colour, a wildly over the top central performance from Vincent Price, and a pulpy, kitsch sensibility…’
PROFESSOR CHARLES E. MAY examines the battle between romance and realism in Daniel Defoe’s ‘A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal’: ‘Short fiction lies between the romance convention of presenting marvelous events and the realistic convention of presenting events as if they actually happened’.
CHRISTINE GENOVESE explores the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, accompanied by Harry Clarke’s haunting black and white illustrations, in the collection Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
