Where the Stories Were Planted

On the Story Seeds Table at the Back of The Anatomy of Shadows, and the Year That Wrote Poe’s Life for Him

20 September ~ 4 min read

There is a table at the very end of my novel that I am prouder of than some of the chapters. It is called Story Seeds. It has two columns. On the left are the tales and poems Edgar Allan Poe would write over the next nineteen years — “The Raven,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” “A Dream Within a Dream,” and more. On the right is the chapter of the novel in which he first meets the thing that will become it.

Some of you will remember that I wrote here, a while ago, about eleven Poe stories hiding inside the novel and the game of finding them. The game is the same. The count is not — the Rue Morgue is back in the book, for one thing — and the table now makes the game official.

I should explain it, because the whole book is built on it.

Poe never went to Paris.

He said he had — he told people he had been to Russia, to Greece, that he had fought abroad — and none of it was true. What is true is that in 1841 he set the first detective story in the world in a Paris he had never seen, with a French gentleman named C. Auguste Dupin solving an impossible double murder in a room locked from the inside. He set two more Dupin stories there. He wrote a poem about a woman named Lenore and another about a raven that speaks one word, and a story about a painter who kills his wife by painting her, and a story about a letter hidden in plain sight, and a story about a heart that will not stop beating under the floorboards. He wrote all of it in America, poor, and mostly unhappy.

My novel asks a simple, unfair question: what if he had had one year in the city he dreamed of, and the year had handed him all of it?

So the raven comes to his window in August, in a fever, and says its word. The stolen letter that saves an actress’s reputation is recovered by the method the Prefect of Police will never think of — it is where the thief expects no one to look. The prologue is a painter in an artist’s studio working strange pigments into his wife’s skin until she is more portrait than woman; the novel returns to her in the gallery chapters, and Poe stands in front of the finished picture. A heart is heard beating in the wrong place. And in December, in a fourth-floor apartment in the Rue Morgue, a widow and her daughter are found dead behind a door bolted from the inside — and it is not Dupin who solves it. It is Edgar, with a sheared nail, a spring-latch, a tuft of tawny hair, and a Maltese sailor’s ribbon. The Prefect buries the truth because revolutionary Paris cannot be told that the killer was an ape. And Edgar decides, in the last pages of the year, that the story will emigrate: he will give the solution to an invented Parisian gentleman who will be believed where he was not, and he will name that gentleman for the landlady whose door always opened. Dupin.

Some seeds are lighter than that. A phrase overheard in the dissection theatre. A line a friend says about a kingdom by the sea. A woman’s name, spoken once in delirium and then kept, by decision, for private hours only. I planted a few of them where a reader who knows Poe will smile, and the rest where no one will notice until the table tells them. That is what the table is for. It is not an answer key. It is the anatomy — the book opened up so you can see where everything came from.

I want to be honest about the cheat, because I am a music historian by training as well as a novelist. Real Poe did not need Paris. He wrote “The Raven” out of a Philadelphia winter and a dying wife, and the Rue Morgue out of a Cuvier article and his own extraordinary head. The seeds in my table are not claims. They are a way of paying attention — of reading the tales back into a year and asking what kind of a year would have had to happen for a young man to come out of it carrying all of that. And the answer the novel gives is: a year of friendship, and a revolution, and a woman with a medical bag, and a locked room. A year of shadows, in other words. Which is what the old title said, and what the new one dissects.

Every writer has a year that wrote the rest of his life. Poe’s never happened. I gave him one, and then I showed my work.

~ Liam