Last week I was too busy being outraged at the internet to spend much time pestering people about the Halloween story contest. Despite this, a few more folks have expressed interest to me privately. The supernatural literary juggernaut presses onward! Remember: the deadline is October 27 — that's three weeks from today — and the democratically-determined winner gets a hundred bucks.

Now! On to more sources of spooky inspiration. I said I'd be heading backward in time, and I'm sticking to that. We started off with Hellboy, then touched on Lovecraft, the latter being a major source of inspiration for the former. Let's do the same thing for Lovecraft and talk about the author that most influenced him: Poe. I know, I know: it's obvious. But it's also unavoidable. I mean, c'mon — just look at the guy.

I picked up a copy of Poe's collected works this spring, and have been intermittently working through his short stories since then. Here's the thing: a lot of them aren't really very scary. Some of his most famous works, like The Pit and the Pendulum, are relatively shallow, shlocky nonsense that reads like it was plotted by an eleven year-old.

Of course, many others are more effective. But even when reading those better stories I frequently find myself thinking that the protagonist would have benefited from growing up under the regime of an older brother, whose cheerful abuse might've forced his younger sibling not to be such an unbelievable wuss.

But that's the point, really, and what makes Poe relevant. In his best stories the terror he describes is almost exclusively psychological in nature: if only the narrator could control his unsteady nerves, or escape his obsession, or even just smoke a bit less opium, everything might be okay. But he can't, so it won't.

The guy's also got a knack for doomed love stories. Or, more precisely, stories that occupy a doomed love affair's epilogue, when hope is gone but a terrifying supernatural ambiguity is just beginning. Those are the ones I like best. Luckily for me there are a surprising number that fit this description — including, of course, The Raven. But my favorite non-animated work is Ligeia, which is not only a good exemplar of the form but also includes the poem The Conqueror Worm, which is pretty great in its own right (and which has also served as inspiration for a Hellboy story).

Poe's pleasantly located in the public domain, so there are a bunch of ways to get the story:

• There's the online text, of course.
• There's also a Librivox audio recording of it (64kbps mp3, 128kbps mp3). Convenient, but Poe's filigreed sentences are essential to conveying his narrator's state of mind, and they're hard to follow when read in the deliberate manner of Librivox contributor Peter Yearsley. (Yearsley's style works well on some other stories, though, so I intend to get back to him.)
• Finally, if you've got an iPhone or iPod Touch you should really go grab Stanza, a free book reader that makes available a large and similarly-cost-free collection of public domain works via Feedbooks. Incidentally, if you have a Kindle or Sony reader (or just something that takes PDFs), Feedbooks has you covered, too, no extra app required.

Okay! Enough with the big names. Next time we'll creep forward, then lurch fully back into the twentieth century. Then I don't know what, but it'll be scary.