This week's Poe Fridays short story was the creepy and grody The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. If you want to play along, you can read it here. This story gets a bit repulsive so don't read it right before you're planning on eating. Yeah right, you say? How about the phrase "profuse out-flowing of a yellowish icor ... of a pungent and highly offensive odor". Now add to that the fact that this came out from under a man's eyelids. Blech!This is our follow-up to the mesmerism story from last week which was quite high-falutin' and philosophical. Poe took the other direction with this story to tell of mesmerizing a man about to die of tuberculosis. He apparently manages to keep the body of the man in a preserved state until after seven months he decides to break the hold on the man. What follows is not good. Apparently, the man had been dead for a LONG time.
Ahh Poe ... just when you start thinking that his writing has a depth and poetic quality, you move on to a story like this with "detestable putrescence" in it. This is definitely a stereotypical story for him. Strangely, I miss the poetry. So for next week, let's go back to a poem ... The Sleeper.
Putting off lunch for a little while,
K
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