Metzengerstein

The first of Poe's tales acknowledged to actually be by him. The kid of this name receives his inheritance and becomes a baron so cruel that he sets light to the stables of the family rival to his, and kills the king of the family and all the king's horses. And the next day, a mysterious horse turns up in his stables. And... duh. He gets obsessed with riding it and nothing else. Until one day his castle bursts into flames and he plunges on the horse's back into the fire and is killed. The last of the Metzengerstein line. Typically jaunty Poe stuff.

Now this other researcher Ben Fisher published a paper saying that this story wasn't so much fictional. It was in a manner of speaking true, autobiographical, but with a metaphorical transformation akin to that of the mysterious horse. Poe was himself orphaned at a young age. And the castle represented the home of his foster-father John Allan. Whom he really didn't like.

The one annoying thing is that a lot of the correspondence between Fisher and Mabbott is locked up under seal until 2025. I bet there's some really interesting stuff in there.

where I am now

I'm out in the mid-west right now. Iowa. I scraped together some money from a scholarship and I'm rifling through the Edgar Allan Poe Archive, the papers of Thomas Ollive Mabbott. He is the don of Poe researchers. He's got copies of everything Poe ever wrote, correspondence as well as fiction. There's a lot in there.

I'm not getting out much, but I am getting much out.