The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

I did not care for this at all. I have also read The Dante Club by the same author. He's carved a little niche for himself, writing novels with a literary tie-in.

It's worth examining in detail just to understand what bothers me about the novel - so I don't commit the same errors.

The protagonist is an idiot for most of the novel. Naive and bungling, yet unbelievably lucky. Not convincing that he would abandon everything to find out the truth about Poe's death. Mystery novels have a long history of the dumb sidekick, but in those cases the sidekick is not the focus of the novel - the detective is. It's not the mysteries of Dr. Watson, it's the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes. In this case neither of the detectives grab the readers imagination, leaving us with this idiot for a protagonist.

Too close to the truth, which, in this case, is boring. I realize the author did a lot of research into Poe's death so that he could wrap his novel around fact. It's boring. You see a mystery about the death of Poe on the bookstore shelf and what springs to mind? Something macabre, something obsessed with being buried alive, something dark and gloomy and fantastic. Instead we get a not-very-cohesive story about Poe being overcome by a single drink of alcohol and spurned by his friends. It's supposed to be fiction, OK? No one expects the truth. It should be a story worthy of the man who wrote The Cask of Amontillado and The Fall of the House of Usher.

The writing style, while it might be appropriate for a novel of the period, is too cumbersome and long-winded for a modern novel with modern readers. There are plenty of examples of historical novels written in a compelling and captivating manner. March and The Year of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks are good examples.

So I didn't like it. Will I read another novel by Pearl? Probably, with the hope that he improves.

Link to Amazon: THE POE SHADOW