Tessa Gratton turns “Annabel Lee” into prose with a female narrator.

Jackson plunks “The Cask of Amontillado” into a modern-day Brooklyn West Indian Day Carnival

Kendare Blake plays with the symbolism of “Metzengerstein”.

Basically, 13 YA authors each took one Poe story or poem and used it as a writing prompt, resulting in the same basic story but modernized, or genderswapped, or genre-swapped, or something totally new drawing only on the original themes. The anthology is edited by Dahlia Adler, and is called His Hideous Heart: 13 of Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Unsettling Tales Reimagined.

Official GeekMom Pet Fran Wilde, whose middle-grade Riverland came out earlier this year, alerted us that she also had a YA story coming out this fall in an anthology especially for today’s morbid teens. His name is synonymous with “goth” to the point of cliche (currently I can’t think of Poe without putting him into the context of the absolutely delightful “ Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party,” which, if you’ve never seen it, you’re welcome). So different from anything else we read in English class! Of all the old dead white men of the Literary Canon we were taught, Poe stuck out to all the moody, morbid, melancholy teens. I couldn’t get over “The Tell-Tale Heart,” how the suspense didn’t come from wondering whether somebody’s about to get murdered (since that part already happened), but whether somebody was being haunted or driven mad. It was fun to be assigned what we thought was some stuffy staid 19th century prose only to discover a warped psychological thriller. I hit this phase peak ’90s YA Point Horror paperback publishing, so I had a wealth of stories to choose from.īut my middle school English teacher didn’t teach us from Point Horror paperbacks, so at school we had to depend on Edgar Allan Poe for our morbid story fix. There’s something about that in-between age, disenchanted but relatively powerless, emotionally volatile and executive-functionally-compromised, longing for independence but fearing the loss of security, that makes the average teenager reach for horror stories. I don’t know about you, but I had a serious morbid streak as a teenager, and I know I’m not alone.

His hideous heart