On the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

I can’t say I love this. The style is characteristically Poe, but I think some of the greatness of his writing is because the bulk of it is in short-form. There’s nothing like the creeping sensation that something is wrong in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or the realization that the murderer in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an orangutan that escaped from its owner. This novel carries Poe’s trademark interest in gore and horror, but the meandering nature of the novel takes away the pace that make his other works so powerful.

That said, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was an influential book, even if it wasn’t well-reviewed at the time. Perhaps most notably, this book inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or, the Whale and various works by French adventure author, Jules Verne. Yet, nearly two centuries after publication, it doesn’t stand up nearly as well as I was hoping.

I understand why Poe wrote a novel—he needed money and could ostensibly make more from writing a novel than short stories—but this isn’t so good.