Readercon

My longread for 2025 (yes, I gave myself even more reading assignments than the ones I’ve already talked about!) was a big old leatherbound, gilt-edged, beribboned copy of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, given to me as a Christmas gift in 2008 by my dad and stepmom and their beloved dog at the time, the now-departed Gussie. I had read many of the pieces in the book before, and I have used the volume as a reference now and again in the ensuing 17 years of goth nonsense, but I hadn’t actually sat down and read the entire thousand-page volume cover to cover.

Now, one of the things that happens when you sit down to read all of Poe instead of just the bits that got really famous, is you realize that a bunch of the stuff that is not famous is not famous for a reason. The quality here is extremely variable. There are some pieces that have, to put it delicately, not aged well. Some are just very repetitive, or kind of vaguely atmospheric to the point where it’s not clear what’s going on, or otherwise just miss the mark. However, lots of it is still very spooky, and lots of it is still pretty funny. I think people these days have largely forgotten that Poe was a comic writer as well as a horror writer, but he was. There is one piece, titled “Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling,” that is written entirely in eye-searing old eye-dialect attempting to convey the accent of the narrator, who is from Connacht, that I could not help but find funny not in spite of but in good part because of the astoundingly old-fashioned anti-Irish racism on display. (Also I learned the word “spalpeen.”) There’s also one where a mummy comes back to life after five thousand years, is offended that anyone thought he was really dead, and talks the narrator into going into essentially cryofreeze for two hundred years. There are multiple stories about hot-air balloons, for some reason. It’s really not the most cohesive body of work, other than all being extremely, extremely nineteenth century.

The collection closes out with Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is definitely the sort of novel that you can tell was written by a short story writer. It is roughly four sequential maritime adventure plotlines strung together, ending very abruptly with an apology for having “lost” the final two or three chapters that would have presumably constituted the climax of the book. We don’t ever find out what Pym found at the South Pole or how he got back to civilization afterward. The only thing I remembered about it from reading it in high school is that the pacing drove me completely up the wall. It drove me slightly less up the wall this time–perhaps because I had split reading it across two separate months, instead of all in one go–but it definitely feels very episodic, and some of the episodes could frankly have been better arranged. In one, the characters are stuck on a mostly-wrecked boat and run out of food, and they do the whole drawing straws and being reduced to cannibalism thing, and then the narrator remembers that he stashed an axe away somewhere and uses it to break into one of the previously sealed-off cabins and rescues a bunch of food. It really undercuts the tragic necessity of the turn to cannibalism in the previous chapter, frankly. Also, the narrator is so busy getting right into his subsequent adventures that he basically never mentions his childhood best friend Augustus again after he dies a horrible gruesome death and his leg falls off. I must continue to reluctantly deem the Narrative as merely being several short stories in a trenchcoat.

Overall I had a great time reading this mishmash of the macabre and the absurd, and I’m glad that American literature has given us Poe, even though he seems to have been an absolute mess of a human being. May his legacy continue to fascinate weird little Goths for the next two hundred years.

I’m almost at the end of my Year of Erics! November’s (theoretically November’s, anyway) installment was Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, about the shelling of Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War.

This was a pretty fast-paced, extremely readable snapshot of the leadup to the beginning of the Civil War, which contains a lot of details that jar some of the assumptions that I think a lot of us hold about the Civil War, like that of course it was going to happen because it was in History Times when wars happen and not in modern times when we’ve just recently invented other options, and that anti-slavery people were always anti-racist (or at least trying) and that the South had the decency to at least pretend it was about something other than slavery (like neo-Confederates try to lie about now). The portrait of Abraham Lincoln was also quite interesting; he’s such a larger-than-life figure that I either had forgotten or never knew that he had to sneak into Washington DC before the inauguration because a bunch of people were worried he’d be assassinated before he was even sworn in. I also, in a weird way, found it oddly soothing that Abraham Lincoln still gets to be a Great Man of History and nobody remembers that he once assigned the same big important battleship to two separate fort defense missions at the same time, thus absolutely fucking over Fort Sumter because the guy who was managing the supplies delivery run kept sitting around outside of Charleston Harbor waiting for the Powhatan to show up Any Minute Now when it was actually in Florida defending some other fort that nobody really gave a shit about. Whatever fuckups I’ve made in my life–and last month I managed to get my car towed during street sweeping twice–I have at least never made a fuckup that big. (Obviously that is partly because I can’t because I’m not the president, but still.)

There were a few figures here who were already familiar to me because they are the biggest of big names in Civil War history, but frankly, I am not a Civil War history buff so the majority of people we spend any real time with were not people I already knew about. There were a few people we spent time with mostly because they kept really detailed diaries, like Mary Chestnut, the wife of some vaguely important Confederate guy, which meant she spent a lot of time rubbing elbows with “the chivalry,” the self-congratulatory title that the aristocracy-LARPing planter class gave itself to further scaffold the fantasy that owning other people and constantly brutalizing your subordinates made you Honorable, but that anyone thinking something was kind of off about that was an intolerable insult to the Honor that this definitely totally Honorable class of people for sure had.

Yeah, so the book made some pretty good and relevant points about how civil war is horrifying and basically every with two brain cells to rub together at the time was trying to find a way to avoid it and only the most obviously bloodthirsty maniacs in a society based entirely on the notion that some people are just allowed to be bloodthirsty maniacs actively wanted it. But also, truly the slaveholding planter aristocracy were some of the worst people to ever live, and I spent the whole book lamenting that John Brown hadn’t gotten every single individual one of them.

Anyway. One of our central characters on the Union side is Major Anderson, the guy in charge of the federal forts in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, who found himself boxed in in a pretty dire way when South Caroline became the first state to secede from the Union. Anderson found himself not only geographically isolated, but also in the infuriating place of continually either not getting guidance from his superiors, or getting vague and contradictory guidance. This was partly due to the limitations of communication technology at that time and the disruptions to the communications infrastructure that did exist due to South Carolina’s secession, but also partly because President Buchanan was useless and indecisive, and because the chain of command was full of people who were about to quit and become Confederates but not before causing as much trouble as they could, and frankly also because once Buchanan was out and Lincoln was in, Lincoln had to take some time to figure out what the fuck was going on and by the time he could give any real decisive orders, getting messages to Anderson was pretty difficult. So after the move from the obsolete Fort Moultrie on land to the incomplete, new Fort Sumter in the middle of the harbor–a brilliant tactical operation conducted under cover of night on Christmas, and that culminated in setting Fort Moultrie on fire so it’d be even more useless to the secessionists than it had been to the Union–Anderson and his men were essentially just increasingly stuck in their bolthole as the food ran low and South Carolinians built–or, mainly, had their slaves build, god forbid white people do any of the work they want done–a bunch of gun batteries in a circle around them.

From then it was kind of only a matter of time before things came to a head, which they eventually did, in ways marked by incompetence, cowardice, very silly and specific notions of honorable and dishonorable behavior, and general ego. Sumter was bombarded and evacuated and Charleston erroneously thought that was the end of that, but instead the Civil War happened, and truly enormous numbers of people died, and slavery was officially abolished although 150 years later the successors to the white planter class aren’t any less racist. The book ends with Edmund Ruffin committing suicide, which, after all I’d just read about Edmund Ruffin in the preceding 400 pages, I consider to be ending on a high note.