Now twenty-four writers have been invited to contribute a posthumous collaboration with Poe, utilizing and developing like they wished the words, the characters and the images from his fragment to create a full story. Interesting idea which makes the present anthology rather unique. Predictably, the result are uneven while a certain degree of repetitiveness is inevitable. On the whole, however, the contributors display a good imagination and a sincere enthusiasm in facing their difficult task.

John Shirley's ‘Blind Eye’ is a powerful tale where the lighthouse's lantern becomes a merciless eye revealing the sins and the vices tainting the inhabitants of the nearby village, whereas Kage Baker's ‘So This Guy Walks Into A Lighthouse’ is an offbeat piece featuring an unconventional doctor and his (defective) device to produce tiny creatures.

In ‘Deep Into The Darkness Peering’ Elizabeth Engstrom gives a perceptive look at Poe's inner darkness while in ‘Last Writes’ Scott Nicholson efficaciously reports the brief, fatal encounter between the lighthouse keeper (Poe himself) and a young local girl.

‘A Passion For Solitude’ by Earl Hamner is a short, creepy tale proving that the keeper was not really alone and ‘The Dead Lantern’ by Michael Arnzen a terrifying story where the lighthouse becomes the scene of a terrible, slow vengeance.

In Richard A Lupoff's ‘Fourth Avenue Interlude’, probably the best story in the volume, Poe's fragment is only the pretext for an excellent yarn where an old writer reminisces about the world of Manhattan bookstores of his early youth.

‘Fisherman's delight’ is yet another delicate trip by Gary Braunbeck into the depths of the human soul, a toy lighthouse representing the shelter for a handicapped boy's mind.

In ‘Salamander Scrimshander’ by Edward Lodi a child molester pays his due as a prisoner inside a lighthouse haunted by a dangerous creature.

Rather surprisingly, Poe's fragment also becomes the source of stories of voyeurism (‘The Watcher at the Window’ by Mort Castle), lesbian love ( ‘I've Been Waiting For You’ by Barry Hoffmann) and even of SF pieces set in distant planets (William Nolan's ‘The Tragic Narrative…’ and Paul Di Filippo's ‘The Days of other Light’).

On the other hand Chelsea Quinn Yabro (‘The New Interpretation Of The Liggerzun Text’) provides an interesting, although slightly cumbersome attempt to interpret Poe's text as a metaphor of his spiritual predicament and to examine it with an exegetic approach.

Other contributors to the book are Carole Nelson Douglas,George Clayton Johnson, Hilary Tham, Mike Resnick and BD Faw, Nick Mamatas,Tim Lebbon,Christopher Conlon,Steve Schlich and Rudy Rucker.

In conclusion, this anthology is a commendable example of literary entertainment , a quality product that Poe himself would approve of.

Mario Guslandi was born and raised in Milan, Italy, where he’s currently living. He became addicted to horror and supernatural fiction more than twenty years ago, after accidentally reading a reprint anthology of stories by MR James, JS Le Fanu, HP Lovecraft and A Machen. Since then his collection of horror books has expanded to the point of requiring continuous addictions of new shelves to his library, in order to avoid the collapse of the whole structure. Most likely the only Italian who regularly reads (and reviews) dark fiction in English, he’s always tempted to hide his true identity under feigned English or american pen-names, just for the fun of it, but then he keeps forgetting to do that.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.