Spooky Season

 

It's fun to read seasonally - as the air changes along the blustery northern winds the seasonal shifts reminds us that we live in a world of perpetual change. We might grow comfortable in the hot, humid air and long days of sunshine, but under our noses a spooky season is coming. It creeps up on you. Suddenly you notice that the sun has shifted in the sky, and that window of yours no longer basks in the summer sunshine, as shadows cross it all day. You then start to realize that the sun is setting earlier each night, and rising later in the morning. Then, overnight, the winds bring in some cooler air and you wake up with a little shiver under your thin covers. 

It's spooky season, or Autumn as I generally notate. With it brings those tales of mystery and murder, dark nights and spooky encounters. It was perfect that on my recent visit to Pressed Books & Coffee I spotted this paperback Edgar Allan Poe collection of short stories. It has a wonderfully atmospheric cover with the spooky mansion and lighted windows. I realized I did not have a collection so I brought it home with me. I have read some of these stories over the years, of course, but none stick out to me as much as my first reading of " The Cask of Amontillado". To read it again now was to revisit that first encounter.

I was in seventh grade English class, and we were assigned readings, per usual. One of them was the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado". I had no idea what I was in for, except that it was a tale of revenge, which is stated in the first line, but I was already feeling the sense of the grotesque from the next paragraph of this tale.

It must be understood, that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good-will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation. 

I will never forget the spooky feeling the story left me with. I had chills. The almost playful countenance of the narrator, following along as he is leading his victim to his death is truly spine-tingling. If you want some chills you can go read the short tale. It was my first encounter with a truly spooky, evil intended tale of revenge and murder. My introduction to Poe and the literary genre of horror left an indelible mark of both appreciation of such word-weaving, and intrigue of formulating such tales. I noticed there's a way to tell such a tale by revealing only just so much information at a time to leave the reader hanging on to see the next page. The reader knows what might be happening, but it's so thrilling they can't stop reading to see if that horror actually unfolds. That's a foundational tool of a good author.

This book isn't just filled with murder stories, there are also a couple of the first detective stories, these that pre-date Conan Doyle's Sherlock, and I can see many aspects of Sherlock Homes, which were such fun to encounter in these tales of solving a murder.

He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inference. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. 

So happy spooky season! I mean, have a great, thrilling reading time!