‘round about 70 days

to All Hallow’s Eve and Poe Cottage is thinking of you! For your delight and entertainment, we plan to screen a special Video Premiere on Halloween Night at 10:00pm on YouTube. We invite you all to attend; we will be watching alongside you, live in the chat.

First, some background about us:

The Director of The Bronx County Historical Society, Dr. Steven Payne, has brought on poet and creator Youssef Alaoui who has been producing a video reading series on Literature of the Fantastic; that’s basically Ghosts, Monsters, and Detectives. It’s a genre that marks the origins of modern Sci-Fi and Speculative Fiction— a truly fantastic era to explore in literature, and his series is called Storytelling Live. Both the Director and Youssef will be present during the premiere and available in the chat.

subscribe to our new YouTube channel.

now, some background about Poe:

Poe’s writing is at the very core of Literature of the Fantastic which branched from high Gothic writings such as Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, John Polidori & the Romantic poet besties Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and quite notably, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who gifted the world with Frankenstein in 1818 at the age of 20 (almost 80 years before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.)

Poe was 9 years old when Frankenstein was published.

He was living in England with the Allans. Bookstores and printed materials were widely available. We believe he would have known about the Romantic poets as anyone would know about Bad Bunny or BTS today.

Most speculative literature sprang from Poe’s ideas of what could best be referred to as the Saturnian Mind (heavy, dark, melancholic, eloquent, romantic) or the Hermetic Mind (all-encompassing; possessing infinite capacity and interwoven with the very fibers of the universe.)

On one hand, we have the melancholic type; Mr. Roderic Usher, who made way for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it could be argued. Or perhaps Maupassant’s Le Horla. On the other hand, we have the all-encompassing mind of Auguste Dupin and his roommate, who made way for Sherlock Holmes and Watson! However, they too share traits of the Saturnian Mind, in that they are studious and focused people.

Yet there is a third hand: Poe specialized in writings of the maniacal or ruined mind.

Now get ready for the show:

👻

THIS HALLOWEEN AT 10 PM!!

In order to enjoy this kind of video moment,
which will be filmed live at Poe Cottage,
click the link below to tune in to our YouTube channel
and sit on your comfy couch
with a beverage of your choice!

“THE BLACK CAT” BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

A TALE OF INEBRIATED FRENZY AND INFERNAL ACTS!

Tune in!

Halloween at Poe Cottage