From a Q & A with the author at the publisher's website:
Q: The Poe Shadow can be read as a celebration of Edgar Allan Poe. Which came first, an enthusiasm for Poe, or your idea for the novel?Read the entire Q & A.
MP: My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including The Black Cat and The Purloined Letter. Being an animal person, I had trouble with The Black Cat! I got hooked instead by The Purloined Letter, a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin. I had already been a Sherlock Holmes fan, and it was eye-opening for me to “discover” Sherlock’s prototype in the form of Dupin. So my entrĂ©e to Poe was through his detective stories, and from there I read more. When it came time for me to decide on what to write as a second novel, Poe returned to my mind. If it were not for those first interactions with Poe, I would probably have been less likely to be committed to studying literature in high school and then college, and then less likely to ever write fiction. I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe — missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear. On the pages of The Purloined Letter, I wrote in big letters: RATIO SENTIAN. I was taking notes from my teacher and trying to write “ratiocination,” a word I had never heard.
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The Page 99 Test: The Poe Shadow.
--Marshal Zeringue