Poe and the Fantastic

[jerome]

Poe et le Fantastic est le titre d'une table ronde organisée par Locus.

Quelques extraits ont été mis en ligne ici

"Gary K. Wolfe: We’re talking here with Brian Evenson, Peter Straub, Liza Groen Trombi, and Ellen Datlow about what is more or less the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth. Ellen edited the retrospective horror anthology Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror (Tachyon, April 2010); Peter has edited a Library of America 200-year retrospective (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, and American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now, 2009) in which Poe obviously is a central figure, and which includes a story by Brian Evenson, whose most recent novel is Last Days. Ellen has also edited the anthology Poe (Solaris US, 2009), with a group of modern writers revisiting Poe’s themes, not necessarily in obvious ways.

Ellen Datlow: I asked the writers to come to me with a Poe story, poem, or non-fiction piece that would inspire them. They had to take something from an existing Poe work, and I didn’t want too many repetitions. Actually, three chose “The Masque of the Red Death” and I knew that they were going to be entirely different from one another and they were. The writers were so good; they weren’t laboriously following the original. Suzy McKee Charnas’s story “Lowland Sea” is “The Masque of the Red Death” but it’s a contemporary plague, an African woman who’s an assistant to movie people who are very decadent, and the whole story takes place in a castle-like fortress, trying to get away from the plague. And that was very different from “Technicolor” by John Langan, which is a brilliant, weird lecture story talking about what Poe meant by “The Masque of the Red Death” — the colors, the relationship to Virginia, the wife, and it’s totally twisted. In Glen Hirshberg’s “The Pikesville Buffalo”, Glen created this charming, bittersweet fantasy, about a guy who goes to visit his aging aunts whose husbands died, and it seems that maybe their husbands turned into buffalo. So the writers are all over the place, and I think they did an excellent job. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The Murder of Marie Roget” is a great mystery, nothing supernatural, about a woman who was attacked by someone she knew, and raped, and it’s about how she deals with it. The stories are all over the place. Some of them were by writers who I had no idea were interested in Poe, like Delia Sherman. And she did a lovely story. I didn’t realize it was as funny as it was meant to be until she read it aloud. It’s a parody of fervent, florid women, and is a very effective dark piece. Lucius Shepard did “Kirikh’quru Krokundo”, a “The Domain of Arnheim” story."