The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

Around Halloween, I'm always looking for a book that will spook and surprise me, trick and treat me. When I saw that Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, had written a new novel, I was ready to greet him at the door, jack-o-lantern full of Kit Kats at the ready. The Dante Club is the kind of novel everyone believes The DaVinci Code to be -- violent, mysterious, adventurous, and brimming with mysticisms and occult findings. The Poe Shadow left me not only lukewarm towards the main character, a very human but belligerently dim-witted and trusting man, but also disenchanted towards any conclusions the book drew.

The main question: with such a captivating nonfiction basis for this book, why was I not more fascinated?


The book uses new evidence to conclude a probable end to Edgar Allan Poe. Any conclusion that the author came to was completely lost on me. I felt as though Pearl and I were walking around in circles, following Quintin on some irreverent chase of the macabre, with neither an end in sight or a beginning in the past. Facts were shared willy-nilly and characters turned and twisted with seemingly petty reasoning. By the end of the novel, I was just happy to have finished. Poe Sho.
Unless you are an Edgar Poe groupie with extensive background in both his life and the mysterious circumstances of his death, think twice before you fetch this novel from the library. Consider The Dante Club instead...at least there you have some authors that solve the mystery.