50 Pages That Changed Everything

How a Comic Book Introduced Me to Poe and Never Let Go

5 April 2026 ~ 3 min read

When my parents passed away and I sold their house back east, I kept very few things from my childhood. One of them was a nearly fifty-page Classics Illustrated comic book I’d packed into my bag years earlier when I left for California. It was called The Gold Bug, and Other Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Classics Illustrated was a series that adapted great literature into comic book form—the idea being that kids who wouldn’t sit down with a volume of Hawthorne or Stevenson might pick up something with illustrations and speech bubbles. It worked. I read that Poe collection over and over, not because anyone assigned it, but because the stories were terrifying and beautiful and I couldn’t stop turning pages. The Tell-Tale Heart was in there—the beating heart under the floorboards, the narrator insisting on his own sanity while proving the opposite. But it was the last story in the collection that stayed with me longest.

The Cask of Amontillado. A man leads his enemy into the catacombs beneath a carnival, chains him to a wall, and bricks him in alive. The horror isn’t the violence—it’s the calm. Montresor narrates his revenge with the politeness of a host pouring wine. He never raises his voice. The most chilling moment isn’t the final brick but the silence that follows it. Even in comic book panels, with illustrated shadows and ink-drawn stonework, that silence came through. I was a kid reading a comic, and Poe taught me that the scariest thing a writer can do is stay quiet at exactly the right moment.

After reading that comic book until the pages softened, I bought a used copy of Poe’s complete works from a university bookstore. I still have that one too—underlined, dog-eared, the spine cracked in all the right places. The real stories were richer, darker, more complex than the illustrated versions, but the Classics Illustrated edition had done its job. It got me through the door. Everything that followed—the years of reading, the discovery that Poe invented detective fiction, the realization that his obsessions rhymed with Berlioz’s—started with pages of comic book panels.

The Cask of Amontillado became the final piece in my concert-opera Extraordinary Tales in Music. I’d set several Poe stories to music, but The Cask was always going to close the show, just as it closed the comic book that started everything. There’s a rightness to that symmetry—the last story a kid read becoming the last piece a composer wrote. And honestly, once you’ve walled up your critics in the catacombs, what else is there left to do?

Years later, when I began writing The Year of Shadows, Poe walked into the novel as naturally as if he’d been waiting for me to catch up. He’d been in my life since that comic book—his voice, his obsessions, his gift for making silence louder than screaming. I just needed time to find a story big enough to put him in.

~ Liam