There are many ways to enjoy a story. In almost ever regard, and on almost every occasion, I will always say the best way is to read it yourself. Like all rules however, there is always an exception. But lets not get ahead of ourselves, there are other matters to attend to first.

All writers go through the occasional fallow period. this doesn’t mean they are not writing of course, and if you are going purely on publication dates (which in Dear Edgar’s case the only option I have) there can be a lot of deceiving factors involved. Lovecraft had his faults, many of them, but he did clearly date everything… Poe on the other hand was less fastidious with dating his work, this and his inclination to tinker with it even after publication makes knowing when something was written and where his fallow periods might be, harder to identify.

However, there is a gap of some fifteen month between the previous story ‘The Assignation’ and this next story Berenice, which was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in March 1835. This represents one of the longest fallow periods in terms of publication in Poe’s career. It was also a period that saw him shift from those earliest humourist works that occasionally paddled around the edges of Lake Horror, to diving into that lake with wilful abandon. Berenice is very defiantly Dear Edgar’s first out and out horror story, and much more the Poe you expect to encounter. It is not unreasonable to say therefore, it was in this fallow period that Poe found himself as a writer… He was to go on to publish six more story in the same magazine over the next few months in a period of frantic activity.

That said, there were other things going on in the life of our Dear Edgar at the time. He had started to drink heavily, something which became a problem quite quickly. He was both hired and fired (for turning up to work drunk) as subeditor of the Southern Literary Messenger in the space of a month in summer of 1835. This was the same year in which he obtained a marriage licence to marry his cousin Virginia Clemm, who aside being his cousin was also thirteen years his junior, though they were not actually married until May the following year when a witness false attested to Virginia being twenty one… She was actually at the time only fourteen, while this was not entirely unusual in the 1830’s, Edgar was twice her age.

By all accounts Virginia was the great love of Edgar’s life, and her early death at twenty four broken him for some time and inspired much of his later works.

Between his emerging alcoholism, unstable employment (he was rehired by the same magazine a month later having sworn to his sobriety) and his complicated romantic entanglements, Poe life was far from settled. He was however finding the inspiration to become the writer he was destined to be, though there was a road to traverse before this transformation was fully realised. But everything you might expect to find in a tale by Poe can be found within this story…

Bernice is a tale of obsession, a monomania in a grandiose Gothic style. Egaeus, the narrator of the tale, is a studious young man given to hanging around in the ancestorial library and brooding a lot. The last male heir of a noble line, he grows up with the an affliction where by he easily becomes obsessed with objects, going into a trance like fixation for minutes , hours or even days.

The Bernice of the title is his cousin, with whom he spent his childhood, and whom is his polar opposite. Where he is serious, studious and like hanging around with dusty books, she like the open air, sunshine and generally larking about in the grass having a good time. In short they have next to nothing in common, until Berenice is struck down by a disease, and in a short time haunts the dusty halls of the mansion in those few hours she is not abed. It is at this point, his cousin dying before his eyes, be proposes to her… because that’s what you do when you flighty fun frolicsome cousin is slowly wasting away of some incurable affliction, you suggest marriage. After all, she can’t run away into the sunlight any more…

Strangely and perhaps as a mark of just how ill she is, she agrees, and the two become engaged, just in time for Egaeus to start regretting his decision. Then some time, her beauty and youth burned away by her illness, Berenice smiles at him one day and he becomes obsessed with her teeth. The only part of her untouched by corruption…

And when Egaeus becomes obsessed, he really becomes obsessed…

Some time late he is aroused from his mania by a servant who tells him Berenice has died. At which point his mania for her teeth really goes a tad over the edge… This involves a shovel, a visit to the grave yard and a hammer , chisel and pliers. As well as the unfortunate revelation that Berenice was not actually dead when they buried her, just in a deep stupor, deep enough to appear dead. Considering what Egaeus’s obsession drives him to do, that is somewhat unfortunate…

This is a very dark tale, in fact it is so dark that Poe himself editing it in later publications to tone down some of the brutality in the original version. Stripping out a lengthy section, it is an interesting act of comparison to read both. While the first is certainly more graphic, I would argue the later edits are an improvement in terms of horror for what they don’t say.

All that said the prose of this story is dense even by Poe’s standards, which make it an awkward read in some respects. Poe is generally a tad more restrained with his prose than he is in this tale, he leans so heavily into the atmosphere of ruinous gothic excess that it edges into the territory of prose poetry more than story telling, there are some wonderful lines. Like the ones below…

 …she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! — I call upon her name — Berenice! — and from the grey ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh! Sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim!

But here in lays a problem , the lines are wonderful, the use of language exquisite, the descriptions rich and layered until its like wading thorough the literary equivalent of a sickly sweet syrup which makes the actual story hard to follow. This is a dark Gothic beauty of a story but it is intoxicating over written. It is, for me at least, so love with its own Gothic grandeur that it fails to be an engaging story.

Take this sentence…

My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative, and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself.

Its splendid isn’t it… But no sentence should need eight comma’s… And what does it actually mean… Well ‘My books feed into my obsessional nature.’ is perhaps the best interpenetration. Yes this is Poe and yes Poe prose always lent towards being a tad overwritten. This is not even the worse example, (see the bottom of this page) But even for Poe some of this story is excessive. Which is perhaps partly on purpose, with a obsessive narrator, but still makes it a tough read to follow, and that is without some fairly oblique classical references and the smattering of Latin and french that crop up along the way. As with earlier stories Poe loves to through a little french about…

However, there other ways to take in this tale other than reading it yourself. There is a wonderful reading of this story by one of the crown princes of Gothic horror. Vincent Price. And frankly I would listen to Vincent Price read the back of a cornflakes packet, so finding this unabridged version was a real treat.

If however you are more taken by the power of visuals over just the sound of Mr Price’s unforgettable voice there is an much abridged version of the same reading used as the narration of a short film of the same name by Vlad Latosh that leans heavily into the Gothic nature of story and is a delight.

But Vincent Price and Eastern European film-makers aside in terms of the story itself while it has plenty of fabulously descriptive prose, and is wonderfully Gothic in splendider, as a story its just difficult to get to grips with… So it gets less ravens than I really wanted to give it…

THREE RAVENS OUT OF AN UNKINDNESS, THE FORTH GOT MIRED DOWN AMIDST A SENTENCE THAT NEVER ENDED.

Should your read it: Sure, but listen to Vincent Price tell it first, you will enjoy it more as when you read it you will hear his voice narrating the story to you in your head ever more…

Should you avoid it: There is no reason to avoid it, save perhaps a desire to avoid getting lost in sentences like this one…

Thus awaking, as it were, from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity at once into the very regions of fairy land — into a palace of imagination — into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition — it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye — that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie — but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers — it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life — wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my common thoughts.

Yes that’s one sentence…

Bluffers facts: As mentioned earlier Poe rewrote the tale in later editions this was after publisher of the Southern Literary Messenger, Thomas W White, received several complaints about the ‘shocking violence’ in the tale.

Poe disagreed with the complaints at the time but later said “I allow that it approaches the very verge of bad taste – but I will not sin quite so egregiously again.” before going on to write a story about a gorilla murdering Parisians by ripping them to pieces…