flapping happily while I pored through some of the coolest, bleakest, darkest, most engaging stories I’d ever encountered.
Oh, I still loved Nancy Drew—and I still snuck the small yellow hardbacks home from the library, sometimes down my pants, if necessary; but I had a new Most Important Writer in my life. He was a sad-eyed man wearing old clothes and a sour mustache, and he wrote about beautiful women with supernatural wasting diseases, and talking birds who foretold doom. He told stories about peril and tragedy, and addiction and loss. He wrote elaborately and thickly, and passionately and profoundly, and I adored him from the bottom of my black little heart.
Poe was my first introduction to truly strange secular literature.
He was the first author who ever told me that it was okay to tell dark, sad little stories and take them seriously—and that furthermore, that this was the only way to write them. I took heart from his insistence all through high school, when I doodled scary tales in notebooks that nobody saw; I leaned on it at the private Christian college I attended, where horror and fantasy were not so much encouraged; and I clung to it in graduate school, where I was told that genre fiction of all kinds was trash, and no one should ever bother with it, least of all me and certainly not in a respectable workshop filled with upstanding students who damn well knew better than to write such drivel.
So thank you, Edgar.
Thank you for refusing to apologize, and for the pride you took in your work—critics be damned. You set a great example for me, and you’ll always have a soft spot in my heart, and on my bookshelf.
* * * *
Cherie Priest’s latest novel is Boneshaker.
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