The performer was fine, the story was meh

This story inspired HP Lovecraft and a slew of other horror authors over the last 187 years. But to me it was meandering and kind of ridiculously pointless at times. The story starts out alright, but it has a tendency to drone on about topics that aren't particularly interesting for the plot and seems more keen on instilling a nautical history in the reader for something that doesn't really need all that background. I don't need to know about the history of the Galapagos turtle to know that islanders have chosen to eat them, it could have been summarized with a sentence mentioning how they'd been hunted to near extinction just as briefly as I'd just told you. Sometimes you don't need to know how it came to be, the fact that it's there is the smoking gun that is all that you need.

It definitely had an impact on HP Lovecraft's work, the ending is just as abrupt and unsatisfying as the ending to a Lovecraft story, with an almost comedic or parodic resolution. Evidently, Poe thought up an interesting idea but couldn't figure out how to end the story proper, so instead of coming up with an ending, he left it open for the reader to try and decide how it ends. While the ending itself wasn't the worst thing ever, the ending comes right after introducing something that would have been a good part of the story, but instead we're left with nothing.

If you happen to like explicit and gratuitous violence, you might really like this story, for me it was simply brutal and how senseless that brutality was. A criticism that the novel received when it was published in 1838 and for the next 120 years thereafter. Poe is an important figure in literature, he inspired some of the greats. Like Lovecraft, I think his strengths were in short stories and not in novels or novellas. This is low fantasy in that it takes place in the same world as our own with the bizarre being an intrusive force in the narrative instead of being a common thing. It certainly was written by a mind of the early 19th century when there was no science fantasy with horror among the stars, and too early for Jules Verne to have inspired with his own narratives below the earth and the waves. So unsurprisingly, Poe went with the most mysterious thing he could think of: the oceans.

This would have been better served as a short story in an anthology of short stories expanding on an alternative Earth, but Poe tried to write a novel without coming up with a thorough plan, and while it has very provocative interesting ideas, it's a bit of a poor novel written as if told from the perspective of someone who can't keep his story straight and gets sidetracked easily. If you like Lovecraft (Cthulhu), Bloch (Psycho), Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) or Howard (Conan) then I would say that you might give it a whirl to see where they all got some of their inspiration from. Just know that it's rough and I would say unfinished.

Vous avez donné votre avis sur cette évaluation.

Vous avez donné votre avis sur cette évaluation.