Reviews for Collected Works Of Poe, Volume Iv (Webster's Korean Thesaurus Edition)

The average rating for Collected Works Of Poe, Volume Iv (Webster's Korean Thesaurus Edition) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-10 00:00:00 Daniel Cipriani ****The Devil in the Belfry: Well, the author opened up by describing a perfect little village where nothing ever changes and everything is exactly the same, and even as he was describing its quaint perfection, all I could think is that that sounds like a nightmare! Honestly, when he described the little identical households full of identical people all doing identical things and where everyone just sits around reverently watching a giant clock all day, the first thing I thought of was Camazotz, not paradise! (The next thing I thought of was to wonder, if every single household has exactly three boys with not a single mention of a daughter, where exactly do the wives come from? Do half the boys spontaneously change sex when they hit puberty or something?) As a matter of fact, I'm fairly certain that this is a parody. I mean, what else can you call it when an odd little stranger wanders into a town of stiff-necked, plump, comfortable conservatives whose first reaction to change or progress or even the slightest little difference is to panic and scream "Stop, stop, STOP!" and causes the entire social order to fall to pieces by'*gasp*!'making the clock strike the wrong time? I wouldn't be surprised if the "devil" was summoned by one of the inhabitants who was desperate to get out of this dystopia. **Lionizing: Maybe the references and/or the subject matter are just too dated, but I'm afraid I don't get the joke. **X-ing a Paragraph: Again, it's clearly supposed to be humorous, but I just don't see the point. Did Poe have a grudge against an editor or something? ***Metzengerstein: Appropriately eerie and atmospheric in a very Poe style. It just didn't seem to have enough buildup. ***The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether: Behold, a super-accurate picture of insanity in which the one and only definition of "insanity" is apparently believing oneself to be something other than human! (Nowadays, we just call that "Otherkin".) I want to know: where exactly did people get this idea? ***The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.: Another satire. If I was wondering before whether Poe might have had some sort of grudge against editors and publishing houses, now I'm sure of it, because this is scathing. ***How to Write a Blackwood Article: Another satire, on (I think?) overly pretentious and/or formulaic writing. ****A Predicament: Okay, I'll admit that this one actually made me laugh. It's a clear sequel to the previous story, in which an amateur writer took the advice of her would-be mentor all too literally, and basically set down everything he advised her word-for-word while having not the slightest grasp of the larger meaning. My experiences in tutoring undergrads definitely lead me to sympathize. The end result is a series of descriptions of completely mundane events that are so overdramatized that it's hilarious, followed by a death scene that's so absurd it could easily have landed a place in the Darwin Awards. ****Mystification: Ah, this one makes fun of people who think they know a lot more than they actually do, and refuse to admit otherwise. I won't deny that was a pretty good punchline. ***Diddling: This would have been a lot funnier had I been able to misinterpret it according to the more... *ahem*... modern definition of "didling", which I did indeed do for the first half of the story. The second is just a bunch of long-winded descriptions of cheating people. ***The Angel of the Odd: Interesting way to get revenge on a skeptic who insists the weird coincidences never happen. **Mellonta Tauta: This is clearly intended to be a satire of something, but it just does nothing but endlessly ramble. *The Duc De L'Omelette: What. No, seriously, what is this even supposed to be about? I don't get it. (And all of the untranslated French that was thrown in certainly did not help.) ****The Oblong Box: Finally, we're back to the dramatic horror writing that Poe did best. There's actually nothing of the supernatural in this one, but it is a good buildup to a sufficiently dramatic reveal. *Loss of Breath: Once again, this was probably supposed to be funny, but I was just bored. The narrator was yelling at his wife for no damn reason the day after their wedding and suddenly lost his breath and suddenly lost his breath so he couldn't speak at all'well serves him right! Everything that happened to him after was just completely pointless. **The Man that Was Used Up: This one was just annoying. Reading it was annoying, and I find comedies that play up the protagonist constantly being frustrated in trying to get a straight answer regarding his man-crush to be generally annoying. **The Business Man: More descriptions of swindling people, and I'm bored again. *The Landscape Garden: Read the first page or so, and skipped over the rest. It's just another long-winded ramble on the virtues of landscape gardening (though thankfully without the scenery porn this time). **Maelzel's Chess Player: Poe sure did spill a lot of ink describing various ways to swindle people. This isn't a story, and it gets boring, fast. **The Power of Words: More navel gazing than anything else. ***The Colloquy of Monos and Una: No real story here, but nevertheless an interesting interpretation of death. ***The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion: Never seen an apocalypse quite like this one before, where instead of hitting the Earth a comet infuses the atmosphere with oxygen which causes everything to set on fire. ***Shadow'A Parable: Creepy atmosphere, but not much of a story. Very short.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-02 00:00:00 Taimur Chaudhri Edgar Allan Poe was funny, a humorist on par with Mark Twain. There, I said it. It's a shame that he gets pigeon-holed as a creepy writer or writer of "haunted tales," which he was. His journalism is wry, sardonic, and fierce. He could mock like Oscar Wilde. The only problem is that his journalism has yet to be collected in a single volume (mem: talk to agent about this), and you have to pick through his 'Complete Works' to read it. At the very least, Google the following essays and read them sooner rather than later: "Lionizing," "How to Write a Blackwood's Article," and "Philosophy of Furniture."