The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 March 1998
by Edgar Allen Poe
In the opening third of this small book, Poe describes a most harrowing adventure that left this reader's skin chilled and crawling for days. The story is of Pym (alliteratively echoing Poe himself) and his ill-starred voyage to the far south seas of Antarctica. Yet, Pym didn't begin his trip for that purpose, and mutiny, isolation, starvation, and various other adventures befall him during a year at sea. Several sections of this book could stand alone as frightening short stories, and little seems to connect them. Indeed, one passage reads like a catalog of island locations, making the reader's mind wander a little. This may be why this is Poe's single long work. The concluding chapters read like an incomplete puzzle and one could be invited to decipher the mysteries of a black island in a vast white torrent. First published in 1838, the story has many images familiar to fans of Melville's Moby Dick or Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, heavy with metaphor and mystical meaning.