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dbarcelon's review against another edition
2.0
I read Dante's Club a few years back and absolutely loved it so I immediately bought a copy of The Poe Shadow when it came out. I started reading the book with high hopes, but right off the bat, the story didn't pull me in. I tried finding something to like, since I loved Pearl's previous book, but I just couldn't. I finished the book just for the sake of finishing it, but I found it dragging and utterly uninspired.
itsneilcochrane's review against another edition
1.0
This book was a huge disappointment. The plot--a young 19th century attorney investigates the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe--seemed promising, but was not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped. I attribute this to two failings: failure to create likeable characters, and failure to adhere to the adage "brevity is the soul of wit."
On the first count: the protagonist, Quentin Clark, is childish and insipid. He's an irritating hero, but what's worse is that he isn't a hero who moves the plot forward. The action is either effected by someone else or happened upon by Clark accidentally. It's also difficult to take him seriously because of his blind, obsessive Poe-worship (which occasionally reads more like the author's, making it just plain awkward). As for the other characters, they all represent archetypes: reserved but brilliant detective, beautiful femme fatale, proper young woman, conniving villain, etc. etc. Now, these archetypes become archetypes because they work, certainly; but it's amazing that these characters are so glancingly treated that they aren't developed further than that in the span of nearly 400 pages.
That brings me to the second count. The book was far too long--especially the long-awaited explication of Poe's death. It was so drawn out that reading it became tedious and I no longer cared about it. I just wanted to get through it. Poe's detective stories were short stories, something Pearl would have done well to remember. As Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit. Dragging out a joke ruins the punchline, and grandstanding with a dénouement is just annoying.
Because of these things (and a few other minor annoyances, like the truly sad attempt at emulating 19th century voice), I ceased to enjoy this book after about the second page. I finished it merely as a matter of principle, and do not recommend it for anyone.
On the first count: the protagonist, Quentin Clark, is childish and insipid. He's an irritating hero, but what's worse is that he isn't a hero who moves the plot forward. The action is either effected by someone else or happened upon by Clark accidentally. It's also difficult to take him seriously because of his blind, obsessive Poe-worship (which occasionally reads more like the author's, making it just plain awkward). As for the other characters, they all represent archetypes: reserved but brilliant detective, beautiful femme fatale, proper young woman, conniving villain, etc. etc. Now, these archetypes become archetypes because they work, certainly; but it's amazing that these characters are so glancingly treated that they aren't developed further than that in the span of nearly 400 pages.
That brings me to the second count. The book was far too long--especially the long-awaited explication of Poe's death. It was so drawn out that reading it became tedious and I no longer cared about it. I just wanted to get through it. Poe's detective stories were short stories, something Pearl would have done well to remember. As Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit. Dragging out a joke ruins the punchline, and grandstanding with a dénouement is just annoying.
Because of these things (and a few other minor annoyances, like the truly sad attempt at emulating 19th century voice), I ceased to enjoy this book after about the second page. I finished it merely as a matter of principle, and do not recommend it for anyone.
noellita234's review against another edition
2.0
Really expected more out of this story but came to care less and less as the book went on. Finally skimmed to the end.
ari__s's review against another edition
2.0
I am a fan of Poe's writing, the few pieces that I've read, which is what drew me to this novel. The pieces focused on in The Poe Shadow were ones that I haven't read, but the time the author takes to explain the details of the stories made the references very clear, so that reading Poe's original work was not necessary to read this contemporary novel (though I think I am now more inclined to read the referenced works). Very similar to listening to a cover of a song, The Poe Shadow compels you to read the original piece.
I got a slight Holmes vibe with the introduction of the Dupin character, which I fixated on, because I am extremely fond of Holmes, and the story does take place at the appropriate time. It does kind of read like a very long Holmes story - kind of. Not nearly as good, though.
Overall, it wasn't an extremely entertaining read, but it was enough so that I continued reading to find out what would be discovered. For a summer read, it was good. I look forward to reading the higher rated Dante Club.
I got a slight Holmes vibe with the introduction of the Dupin character, which I fixated on, because I am extremely fond of Holmes, and the story does take place at the appropriate time. It does kind of read like a very long Holmes story - kind of. Not nearly as good, though.
Overall, it wasn't an extremely entertaining read, but it was enough so that I continued reading to find out what would be discovered. For a summer read, it was good. I look forward to reading the higher rated Dante Club.
tracey_stewart's review against another edition
3.0
I loved The Dante Club (reviewed in July). It was intelligent, and pure geeky fun, and I had a lovely time picking my way among the corpses in 19th century Boston. So I jumped at the chance to take The Poe Shadow on paperbackswap.com.
I should preface this by admitting I haven't read much Poe. I have a couple of collections; I've just ... never gotten around to it. But I'm familiar with his most famous poems, I knew who C. Auguste Dupin was, and I knew a little about Poe's life and reputation - about the fact that though he was often condemned for being a drunkard he was not, and in fact had a very low tolerance for alcohol. And about his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, and his despair at her early death. But the only work I've read about him before this was some dreadful thing I can't recall the name of and won't look up which cast him and P.T. Barnum as detectives... This had to be light years better.
And it was. Especially in the beginning I had as much fun as I did with The Dante Club. The story is told in the first person by Quentin Clark, an attorney in Baltimore in 1849 who has long enjoyed reading Poe. "Enjoyed" is actually an understatement; Clark's interest in the poet and his work begins to sound like obsession, and that becomes full-blown as the book proceeds - but it begins with his defiance of his family's opinion that Poe is a dangerous influence. He reads every scrap that he can find, and enters into a correspondence with Poe, even offering his legal services pro bono if they are needed to defend the magazine Poe dreams of starting.
Upon Poe's death, Clark is distressed by the tone of newspaper articles and essays. Most of them paint him, obliquely or outright, as a drunk, and most take the tone that he didn't contribute much to the universe and won't much be missed. Outraged, Clark begins a campaign to try to gain retractions and corrections, to try to rehabilitate Poe's reputation, which leads by various paths to his quest to find the real man who was Poe's inspiration for Dupin, the genius of detection. Surely the real Dupin can discover the truth about Poe's death and clear his name.
The quest leads Clark to Paris, which is in an upheaval of government; it has not been so long since the French Revolution, and now the republic is beginning to give way to a new empire under the Bonapartes. It's dangerous, but the obsession is strong, and Clark soon has two possible Dupins on his hands: the attorney Baron Dupin, whom Clark had written earlier, and Duponte, who is the new lead contender. Baron Dupin is a charlatan and showman, and Clark decides he can't be the one - especially as he learns more about Duponte, an investigator who fits the descriptions in Poe's stories perfectly. He works to bring the latter back to Baltimore, and to complicate matters the former comes too, along with his wife (a beautiful assassin) and a matched set of men who appear to be hunting him for reasons unknown.
It's not a spoiler to state that Clark winds up accused of a murder; that's given on the first page of the book. And I don't think it's a spoiler to say that that's about when the book started to lose me. Halfway through the book, not the first page. Clark's need to exonerate Poe grows to a state in which he can do nothing else; he loses his practice, and, through her family, his fiancee, and shortly is in danger of losing the home he inherited from his parents as his aunt brings a case against him stating he has lost his sanity. Between simply being a little fed up with a man who would sacrifice everything without even a thought - and not even so much the fact of the sacrifice as the pain it caused his family and beloved Hattie - and behaving in a thoroughly unreasonable manner in pursuit of a noble goal; and being more than a little fed up with the prospects of an International Conspiracy (I hate International Conspiracy as Tolkien despised allegory: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence") - the book started to lose me, and never really got me back. I finished it - but it was a long slog. I read a review that referred to Clark as an unreliable narrator: quite right. While he doesn't necessarily intentionally lie to the reader, he makes wild assumptions, changes his mind, and becomes somewhat unhinged. That reviewer had a time of it with the mid-19th century language; I didn't find that nearly as difficult as I often do (it's usually harder to read pseudo-19th-century than the real thing, I find). That was the least of my problems with the book.
On the whole, I'm glad I read it. I learned a good deal - for one thing, I'm going to try very hard to avoid referring to Poe as "Edgar Allan Poe", as he hated it, with good reason. (Or he might not have; I'm told that's a myth. Which calls into question every single other thing put forward as fact in the novel. Which is troubling.) For another, it took the taste of that other Poe/Barnum book out of my mouth; there's a certain irony in this book rehabilitating the name of Poe for me as Clark fought to do in Baltimore. And I'm going to read Poe, soon. But I don't think this will come up for a reread very soon. It felt disjointed in places, and as though Pearl lost the reins for a while and was a passenger in a runaway carriage: as if Pearl's research into Poe and his death created in him much the same condition as he describes in Clark. Method writing? Maybe. The Poe Shadow both explained and created allure about Poe, and raised Poe in my estimation while, sadly, lowering Pearl a notch or two. But this didn't kill my respect; on the contrary. I did love Dante; I do respect the tremendous amount of work that went into making The Poe Shadow - and his third, latest book is The Last Dickens (Drood!). I look forward to it. I hope it's more like the first book than the second ... ~Stewartry
I should preface this by admitting I haven't read much Poe. I have a couple of collections; I've just ... never gotten around to it. But I'm familiar with his most famous poems, I knew who C. Auguste Dupin was, and I knew a little about Poe's life and reputation - about the fact that though he was often condemned for being a drunkard he was not, and in fact had a very low tolerance for alcohol. And about his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, and his despair at her early death. But the only work I've read about him before this was some dreadful thing I can't recall the name of and won't look up which cast him and P.T. Barnum as detectives... This had to be light years better.
And it was. Especially in the beginning I had as much fun as I did with The Dante Club. The story is told in the first person by Quentin Clark, an attorney in Baltimore in 1849 who has long enjoyed reading Poe. "Enjoyed" is actually an understatement; Clark's interest in the poet and his work begins to sound like obsession, and that becomes full-blown as the book proceeds - but it begins with his defiance of his family's opinion that Poe is a dangerous influence. He reads every scrap that he can find, and enters into a correspondence with Poe, even offering his legal services pro bono if they are needed to defend the magazine Poe dreams of starting.
Upon Poe's death, Clark is distressed by the tone of newspaper articles and essays. Most of them paint him, obliquely or outright, as a drunk, and most take the tone that he didn't contribute much to the universe and won't much be missed. Outraged, Clark begins a campaign to try to gain retractions and corrections, to try to rehabilitate Poe's reputation, which leads by various paths to his quest to find the real man who was Poe's inspiration for Dupin, the genius of detection. Surely the real Dupin can discover the truth about Poe's death and clear his name.
The quest leads Clark to Paris, which is in an upheaval of government; it has not been so long since the French Revolution, and now the republic is beginning to give way to a new empire under the Bonapartes. It's dangerous, but the obsession is strong, and Clark soon has two possible Dupins on his hands: the attorney Baron Dupin, whom Clark had written earlier, and Duponte, who is the new lead contender. Baron Dupin is a charlatan and showman, and Clark decides he can't be the one - especially as he learns more about Duponte, an investigator who fits the descriptions in Poe's stories perfectly. He works to bring the latter back to Baltimore, and to complicate matters the former comes too, along with his wife (a beautiful assassin) and a matched set of men who appear to be hunting him for reasons unknown.
It's not a spoiler to state that Clark winds up accused of a murder; that's given on the first page of the book. And I don't think it's a spoiler to say that that's about when the book started to lose me. Halfway through the book, not the first page. Clark's need to exonerate Poe grows to a state in which he can do nothing else; he loses his practice, and, through her family, his fiancee, and shortly is in danger of losing the home he inherited from his parents as his aunt brings a case against him stating he has lost his sanity. Between simply being a little fed up with a man who would sacrifice everything without even a thought - and not even so much the fact of the sacrifice as the pain it caused his family and beloved Hattie - and behaving in a thoroughly unreasonable manner in pursuit of a noble goal; and being more than a little fed up with the prospects of an International Conspiracy (I hate International Conspiracy as Tolkien despised allegory: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence") - the book started to lose me, and never really got me back. I finished it - but it was a long slog. I read a review that referred to Clark as an unreliable narrator: quite right. While he doesn't necessarily intentionally lie to the reader, he makes wild assumptions, changes his mind, and becomes somewhat unhinged. That reviewer had a time of it with the mid-19th century language; I didn't find that nearly as difficult as I often do (it's usually harder to read pseudo-19th-century than the real thing, I find). That was the least of my problems with the book.
On the whole, I'm glad I read it. I learned a good deal - for one thing, I'm going to try very hard to avoid referring to Poe as "Edgar Allan Poe", as he hated it, with good reason. (Or he might not have; I'm told that's a myth. Which calls into question every single other thing put forward as fact in the novel. Which is troubling.) For another, it took the taste of that other Poe/Barnum book out of my mouth; there's a certain irony in this book rehabilitating the name of Poe for me as Clark fought to do in Baltimore. And I'm going to read Poe, soon. But I don't think this will come up for a reread very soon. It felt disjointed in places, and as though Pearl lost the reins for a while and was a passenger in a runaway carriage: as if Pearl's research into Poe and his death created in him much the same condition as he describes in Clark. Method writing? Maybe. The Poe Shadow both explained and created allure about Poe, and raised Poe in my estimation while, sadly, lowering Pearl a notch or two. But this didn't kill my respect; on the contrary. I did love Dante; I do respect the tremendous amount of work that went into making The Poe Shadow - and his third, latest book is The Last Dickens (Drood!). I look forward to it. I hope it's more like the first book than the second ... ~Stewartry
jgmencarini's review against another edition
3.0
This book was great until the last 20 pages and the ending was TERRIBLE. The language was fascinating, the plot interesting, and then the author clearly ran out of steam. Very disappointing ending to an otherwise good work of literary fiction.
skybalon's review against another edition
3.0
Like all of the author's books, it takes a bit to get into and like all of his books there is a subtle but clear attempt to mimic the subject's (in this case Poe's) style. And that both helps and hurts the flow somewhat. It also feels like the actually plot takes more second place to everything else. It isn't bad but it wasn't all that enjoyable either.
maggie73's review against another edition
1.0
(DNF - Pg.100). Not remotely interested in either the ‘mystery’ or the characters. Protagonist was annoying as hell.
bookmaineiac's review against another edition
2.0
Pretty dry - nowhere near as interesting as The Dante Club.