Description

The Facts in the Case of E. A. Poe by Andrew Sinclair

Trade Paperback – Valancourt – 2013 – 190 pages

Ernest Albert Pons is a Holocaust survivor with an unusual coping mechanism: he lives in the delusion that he is, in fact, Edgar Allan Poe. His psychiatrist Dupin (chosen because he shares a name with Poe’s fictional detective) has a radical idea for treatment: Pons must see for himself that he is not Poe by retracing the poet’s steps and writing an analysis of his life. As Pons pursues Poe from his childhood and university years in Virginia to his adult life in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, we gradually learn the secrets of both men’s pasts. But when Pons begins to suspect Dupin may be engineering an elaborate scheme to kill him, is it just another part of his delusion, or is Dupin plotting a macabre twist worthy of Poe?