Poe’s stories—even his humorous tales, even his detective stories—are populated by amnesiacs and obsessives, by people doomed to remember what they desire only to forget, and are told by madmen and liars and lovers and ghosts. They are powered by what remains untold as much as by what Poe tells us, each of them split and shivered by a crack as deep and as dangerous as the fissure that runs from top to bottom of the gloomy house inhabited by Roderick and Madeline Usher.

For some of you this will be the first encounter with Poe, while others of you will be here because you already appreciate Poe’s work, or because you treasure beautiful books, and beautiful poems. And still, and still, “There is no exquisite beauty,” as Poe reminds us, in “Ligeia,” “without some strangeness in the proportion . . .”

From the introduction to the 2004 Barnes & Noble Deluxe Edition of Selected Poems and Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Mark Summers.

On The New Annotated Dracula

A few days ago there was an article in the English newspapers which purported to show how badly history was being taught these days, or perhaps display the state of ignorance of history in Britain. In it we learned that many British teenagers believe that Winston Churchill and Richard the Lionheart were mythical or fictional, while over half of them were sure that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, just as they believe in King Arthur. Nothing was said in the article about Dracula, however—perhaps because he was not British, although the adventure that brought him to public consciousness was certainly British, even though the chronicler was an Irishman.

I wonder what people would have said if they had been asked, how many of them would have believed that there really was a Dracula. (Not the historical Dracula, mind, Vlad Dracula, the son of the Dragon, the impaler. He existed all right, although whether he shares anything more than a name with the real, as opposed to the historical, Dracula is debatable.)

I think they would have believed in him.

I do.

I first read Bram Stoker’s book Dracula when I was about seven, having found it on a friend’s father’s bookshelf, although my encounter with Dracula at that point consisted of reading the first part of the story, Jonathan Harker’s unfortunate visit to Castle Dracula, and then immediately turning to the end of the book, where I read enough of it to be certain that Dracula died and could not get out of the book to harm me. Having established this, I put it back on the shelf, and did not pick up another copy of the book until I was a teenager, impelled by Stephen King’s vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot and by Danse Macabre, King’s examination of the horror genre.

(I watched the film Son of Dracula as an eight-year-old, though, wondering whether young Quincey Harker had, as I expected, grown up to be a vampire, and was disappointed to discover that the son was only Dracula himself, in the bayou, calling himself “Count Alucard,” a name that seemed fairly transparent even then. But I digress.)