Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe

So as you know Edgar Allen Poe suddenly surfaced in Baltimore raving unto death, a mystery forever inexplicable, and this has thrilled generations of readers as apropos; we do so love a death apropos, it wreathes life with the faintest sense of poetry. Which proves enormously appealing to our everyman narrator slogging toward middleage to be born, so “tired of the day-in, day-out… of being overlooked and underappreciated. You deserve more.” A lot more more, it seems, wishing to swing the pendulum across the pit: “All you wanted was to publish a novel. Take it on tour. See your name on the bestseller lists. Was that so much to ask?” Cue Mephistopheles with bargain in tow, offering you either literary reverence or its opposite, monetizable fame. One does not write hundreds of thousands of words without the narcissistic insistence that the void should not be more eloquent, so I perused the literary option: “From a scan through the lengthy synopsis, you see it’s a multigenerational family saga of an American farming family that produces three children. The two sons become doctors and move to the city, while the daughter establishes a veterinary practice near the farm.” Needless to say I chose the famous option. This decision point layers in the game’s innovation on the tale, doubling the doublebind by binding you to whichever authorial attunement imbues your name with its resonances: “In the glass, your reflection stares back at you … you come to realize the glass wall permits you to see into another passageway… the path you did not take. It’s your split double, the one who chose to be literary.”

With the stage set for the artist’s struggle between their daily bread and their Last Supper, we promptly throw it out the window for a dizzying time travel caper involving three whole sets of Faustian twins sprawled across half a millennium, multiple explosions with a quantum of mechanics, and two separate attempts to come loose in time through legalese. If that all sounds complicated, then the thematic heft of these hijinks is more concise: the reward of success is the fulfillment of the attempt, otherwise you may as well drive a marathon, gets you to the same place. “The curse of mediocrity has returned. It’s like it was before that fateful day in Belyle’s office, when you desperately craved to write a novel. / No, you desperately craved publication - to be lauded and praised. The writing was always a means to an end. / Pen in hand, you stop waiting and start thinking. An idea peeks its nose up. One by one, you wrestle out the opening words of what might become a novel…” There is of course no point in having written a book if you haven’t written a book, so moral in hand we’re right back to where we started…

Where did we start again? Oh yes, Edgar Allen Poe. In celebration of his role in developing the detective genre, we’re donning a fedora as our “lips fidget with the toothpick”, ready to gumshoe nineteenth century Baltimore, gathering clues to uncover the circumstances of Poe’s death, which has gotten gnarled up with all the above. A few homages to Poe help settle the setdressing, with a lighthouse in line with his unfinished final story, a climactic confrontation with rival Rufus Griswold, a few lines of Annabel Lee lying around, and assuredly a raven, box ticked. What the story seems to miss most is the quality for which Poe was most famous, an overbearing pervasion of mood. The prose is frequently workman, even rather curt, only occasionally crafting up the effort expected of a work ardently enjoining us to our writerly duty of “Nurturing your dream with sweat and passion.” A shocking revelation withers on the line: “Belyle’s involvement is now confirmed. My suspicions about Poe’s ordeal have been justified. It sickens me to think Belyle may have played some part in Poe’s now-fragile condition." Ah yes, I see, it’s the demons; make a note of that, will you, Watson? When the writing does go grand, it can trip over itself by simply restating the previous sentence with gusto: “To your horror, the fountain pen’s ink is blood. The oily vermilion liquid congeals to a black crust across the dotted line.” This is a shame, because the author is quite clearly capable of arresting visuals like “knife-edged sleet” and “his now-crystallized froth made his mouth hairy with ice”, and maybe it’s a little silly but the sheer inventiveness makes it my favorite: “Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate.” Honestly, I think the glue that keeps this juryrigged Poe/Faust/Jekyll/airport thriller hybrid humming along are these moments of gothic effusion, so I kept craving menace. With what we have, at least some humor makes a virtue of the dryness, with jokes ranging from the very broad ““And here’s your free whiskey,” the one nearest me says. She presses a voucher into my hands. / And so concludes my introduction to American Democracy.” to the little less broad “From the blast marks about the room, my powers of perception tell me this is the locus of the fire - it originated here.” I also laughed when, having read the literary precis, I thought gosh who other than Franzen is desperate to be Franzen, only for the game to namecheck him later as its caricature source.

Rather than mood, the game seems inspired instead by Poe’s most famous quality, high concept succinctness. It’s an enormous credit to the pace and focus of the work that the somewhat awkward mashup of ideas streamlines thrillerishly propulsive. While I would have liked more emphasis on the duality of lives debating the roads traveled, there is a satisfying dialogue between the doubles at the end which sculpts to a delightfully morose capstone: “You feel vaguely dirty signing your other’s book, cowardly claiming someone else’s compromises as your own.” Artworks are vitalities of another’s compromises comprising a destiny, so though this work’s are not the ones I might’ve made, I’ll still celebrate the ease in which it couches its furtive intensity, a stainless steel requiem for the individuality that dies with a writer, what strikes us in “the nurse frantically trying to explain something about a bombing victim’s last words.”