Edgar Allan Poe stories with a diverse, YA twist? Yes, please! So many of us first discover Poe during our teenage years that it seems perfectly fitting to reinterpret his stories in a young adult context. Editor Dahlia Adler does exactly this in her upcoming anthology His Hideous Heart, which gathers together thirteen celebrated YA authors to write modern tales inspired by some of Poe’s. I’ve been invited to participate in the official blog tour for His Hideous Heart, which comes out on September 10. See my thoughts on the book below, and be sure to check out the preorder link at the end of the post!
His Hideous Heart accomplishes the impressive feat of honoring Poe’s original works, while also bringing in some much-needed new perspectives. I absolutely adore old Edgar, but even I have to admit that he has a few shortcomings—one of the most prominent of which is that almost all of his tales are told from the limited perspective of straight, white men. His Hideous Heart takes these stories back to the margins, where horror thrives, by reimagining them from more marginalized perspectives. The vast majority of the tales here are told from the perspective of teenage girls, many of whom are queer or people of color. The protagonists are outcasts, orphans, servants, or simply kids, facing not just the horrors of a Poe-worthy plot, but also the horrors of moving through a world in which others are given power over them. Dahlia Adler sets the tone of the collection in a short introduction, in which she reminisces about her first encounters with Poe’s works and discusses how new perspectives can entirely change the story. What follows are twelve stories and a poem, each inspired by one of Poe’s works, both the obvious and the obscure. The book also includes the text of the original tales at the back, which you’ll definitely want to check out if you need a refresher. I found myself flipping back and forth to reread the original tales, either before or after reading the reimagined version, to catch all the nuanced details that these clever authors snuck in!
Some of my favorite stories in this collection were those that featured a femme fatale. Edgar Allan Poe liked to write from the perspective of slightly unhinged killers, to evoke horror through exploring inside the mind of a madman and a murderer. However, when you recast the protagonists as girls with some very real grievances, suddenly their acts of violence seem a little bit more understandable. The first story in this collection to truly knock me off my feet was “It’s Carnival!” by Tiffany D. Jackson, which reimagines “The Cask of Amontillado” set during the West Indian Day parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’m a little bit biased because I love seeing stories set in my own neighborhood, but I thought it was profoundly clever to have a young woman in an elaborate feathered costume lure away her neighborhood bully amidst the chaos of the parade with the promise of her father’s sorrel drink. Stephanie Kuehn has a similarly cut-throat protagonist in “Happy Days, Sweetheart,” her version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which a high school senior devises a heartless plan to do away with her rival for class valedictorian. Kuehn creates an interesting commentary on gender when, instead of having her narrator insist “I am not mad,” her repeated phrase is “I didn’t cry.” For women, the opposite of being rational and respected is not madness, but merely emotion. Kuehn also makes a convincing argument that changing the gender of the story’s protagonist significantly changes its ending.
Another of Poe’s favorite themes, apart from ruthless killers, was love. Specifically, the love of a young man for a dead or dying woman. In His Hideous Heart, however, love exists among many different identities and orientations. What if you not only had to deal with the death of the girl you loved most in the world, but also with the stigma of homophobia adding guilt to your grief? Tessa Gratton explores this concept in “Night-Tide,” a lesbian retelling of “Annabel Lee” set in a seaside resort called Kingdom by the Sea. Dahlia Adler’s own story, “Lygia,” features a more toxic relationship. The narrator in this story deals with her grief by trying to make her new girlfriend more like her first one. And on prom night … she finally succeeds. Rin Chupeco gives us a happier love story in “The Murders in the Rue Apartelle, Boracay,” a story that takes the premise of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” but sets it in a fantastical version of the Philippines populated by vampires, werewolves, and aswangs. Ogie Dupin is the brilliant half-French, half-Filipino son of an ambassador. The story’s narrator is a transgender Filipina girl who quickly falls for him. Together, they solve a mystery related to two dead Americans—but the story has a twist ending quite different from Poe’s original.
Lastly, some of the most imaginative tales in this piece were those that decided to play around with genre. There were two stories in particular that went further than merely modernizing the tales, instead placing the stories in futuristic sci-fi settings to give them a fun speculative spin. The first of these is “A Drop of Stolen Ink,” Emily Lloyd Jones’s take on Poe’s third mystery to feature the detective Dupin, “The Purloined Letter.” Set in a world where everyone’s identity is contained in a government-issued tattoo, this story has only a roughly similar plot to Poe’s original, but it emphasizes the same overarching theme: the thing you’re looking for may be hidden in plain sight. The protagonist is a teenage cyborg currently going by the name Augusta, who is given a secret mission to discover where a criminal has hidden a stolen identity tattoo. Fran Wilde’s “The Fall of the Bank of Usher” (an obvious riff on “The Fall of the House of Usher”) has a similarly cyberpunk vibe. The story features teenage hackers, Mad and Rik, who take on a challenge issued by a well-respected bank to test its security features. When they find themselves trapped inside, they realize that the only way to take down the bank’s defenses may just be to take down the bank itself.
And these are only half the stories in the collection! The others are equally inventive and insightful. Each story in the anthology manages to serve as both a critique and a celebration of Poe’s works. I recommend the collection anyone who either loves Edgar Allan Poe or YA literature. And if you, like me, are at the intersection of these two interests, you’ll want to bump this book to the top of your list! You’ll be able to find His Hideous Heart in stores beginning on September 10. You can also preorder it online from an independent bookstore and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking on this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, be sure to let me know what you think in the comments!