Poe: Stories and Poems by Gareth Hinds (review)

Edgar Allan Poe's work has been a perennial favorite for adaptation, ranging from literary reimaginings to feature films and even inspiring the television series The Following (2013–15), in which a detective tracks down a murderer inspired by Poe and his writing. Poe allusions abound in popular culture, from The Simpsons to South Park, as the author remains a cultural touchstone for the mysterious and macabre. Graphic novels have also proven a fruitful medium for adapting Poe, with the combination of text and image creating new opportunities for envisioning and imagining Poe's work. Some of these graphic novels adapt a single story, like Matthew K. Manning and Jim Jimenz's The Fall of the House of Usher, which is part of the larger Edgar Allan Poe Graphic Novel Series; other adaptations take an anthology or compilation approach, such as Gris Grimly's Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Madness and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Death and Dementia, and can be either single-authored or feature a different author or artist for each segment.

Gareth Hinds's Poe: Stories and Poems is an excellent addition to anthology-style works of Poe by a single author. Hinds's collection includes "The Mask of the Red Death," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and "The Tell-Tale Heart," and perhaps even more notably, graphic novel versions of a few of Poe's best-known poems: "Annabel Lee," "The Bells," and "The Raven." Hinds is well established as a graphic novel adapter of classic works, with previous adaptations including Beowulf (2007), Homer's The Odyssey (2010), and several of Shakespeare's plays, including King Lear (2009), Romeo and Juliet (2013), and Macbeth (2015), all published by Candlewick Press. Much like the accessible adaptations of the Edgar Allan Poe Graphic Novels Series, Hinds's Poe: Stories and Poems is educator-friendly, with a biography of Poe at the end, as well as a brief critical perspective on each of the works, including historical context, definitions of poetic form, and notes on classical references in "The Raven." One of the distinguishing benefits of a collection such as this—whether written by a single author or in compilation—is the inclusion of multiple works by Poe, as well as the chance to identify key themes and connections between works, an opportunity Hinds seizes early in his collection with a "Poe Checklist" of themes opposite the table of contents page, with visual icons and textual identifiers including "confinement," "creepy animals," "darkness," "death," "guilty conscience (or lack thereof)," "insanity," "murder," "premature burial," and "scary sounds, hypersensitivity," codes which he then uses on the title page of individual works.

Another benefit of a graphic novel collection of Poe, as opposed to an adaptation of a single story, is the opportunity to engage different visual styles in each, particularly as used to reflect the specific narrative and emotional tone of individual works, which Hinds utilizes to full effect in Poe: Stories and Poems. Echoing this approach in similar graphic novel collections and in Raul Garcia's 2013 anthology film Extraordinary Tales, which features a dramatically different visual style for each of the segments, in Poe: Stories and Poems Hinds does an excellent job in of creating visual distinction between and within Poe's different works. For example, "The Masque of the Red Death" starts out in a naturalistic palette before the action moves inside Prince Prospero's castle, where the panels are distinguished by varied and richly saturated hues, visually underscoring Poe's description of the individual rooms' coloring as one moves more deeply into the castle and its revels. In addition to the masterful use of color, the visual design and layout of the graphic novel page also tracks a tone of increasing panic and disintegration as the story progresses. In its early pages, the panels are small, separate, and self-contained (5), but these demarcations between rooms, color schemes, and panels quickly break down as boundaries and the illusion...