On Bad Reviews and Writing the Scary Book Inside of Me

As a writer I have been fortunate in that the majority of people who review my books give positive reviews. Every now and then I get a negative one. This, in itself, does not bother me. Negative reviews are the price of art. Good art should come from an unfamiliar place and when it does it has the ability to exhilarate and shock the eye of the beholder. Because of this authors who are only getting positive reviews are doing something wrong, as strange as that may sound. Take any great book of literature and you will find many horrible reviews. "The Catcher in the Rye," one of my favorite little jewels of literature, has many one star reviews.

So not only do I expect the occasional bad review, but they are necessary if I am being true to my art form. The kind of review I hate the most--yes, even more than the "this was the worst book ever written"--are those that say "this is not what I expected." Read another way, the reviewer means this is not the book they wanted me to write.

Pardon, moi. I recently got a two-star review in such a way for Coffee with Poe: A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe's Life.

I need to write the book that's inside of me begging to get out; the one that nags at me while I'm sitting at the table having a holiday meal with my family while I stuff another piece of broccoli in my mouth; the one that talks to me at two in the morning when I'm having trouble sleeping.

I have no way of knowing what a random person I have never met will need to me write for them. Even if I had such a blueprint, I would not do it. I simply write the books I want to read and that will push the art form forward. I am not trying to sound cruel or be calloused. I can accept bad reviews. Ii really can. Please, try not to judge my books because they fail to be the book you wanted me to write.

The Divine Dantes Trilogy by Andrew Barger is Published!

Divine Dantes Book I

$.99 Ebook

“[A] lively and good-natured work with a great deal of humor . . ..”

Publisher’s Weekly Reviewer

“[R]eminds me a little of the fun I find in Carl Hiaasen or Christopher Moore, but he definitely has his own vibe . . ..”

Breakthrough Novel Award Expert Reviewer

A Best Second Novel award finalist in the Indie Book Awards, "The Divine Dantes: Squirt Guns in Hades" is the first in a trilogy of laugh-out-loud books paralleling Dante Alighieri's classic poem, The Divine Comedy, where the characters of The Inferno are encountered in modern times with surprising results. The novel also has it own scary story moments. At the center is Eddie, a young rocker who is heartbroken after his girlfriend, Beatrice, leaves for Venice. This not only ends their relationship, but also the world's greatest two-person rock band. At Beatrice's request, Virgil-their erstwhile manager-cum-travel-agent guides Eddie to Europe to meet her without Eddie being in on the secret. Will Eddie want to see Beatrice? Will the band get back together? And if it does, can Eddie settle on a name for it? Read the first novel in this literary, rock, love story today!

Divine Dantes Book II

$0.99 Ebook

Book 2 of The Divine Dantes's Infernal Trilogy finds Eddie and Virgil in Barcelona, Spain. Eddie, the young rocker with an active mind, thinks they are there to get on a cruise. Virgil, however, has tricked Eddie and arranged for Bea to secretly meet them. Meantime, Virg and Eddie visit famous Barcelona landmarks (La Sagrada Familia, Park Guell, La Rambla Street, etc) as Eddie adds his trademark commentary. Will Eddie speak to Bea when she arrives? And if he will, does their two-person band get back together?

Divine Dantes Book III

$1.99 Ebook

In this final volume of The Divine Dantes trilogy series, Eddie finds himself on a cruise with his beloved Beatrice. There will be mayhem, love and of course rock-n-roll.

Buy the trilogy today and get ready to rock on in a Divine Comedy way.

#DivineDantes #DivineComedy #RockNovels

"Tales from the Smith" Illustrated Book Series Lauched

In a play on the popular TV horror show "Tales from the Crypt" that aired in the 1990s, Butcher Billy has combined his love for The Cure and Robert Smith with his talents as an illustrator to launch an illustrated (and scary) book series. It employs creative use of Cure lyrics into the title. Check it out!

The cover above is The Cure's most claustrophobic song and could very well be the cover song for The Iron Shroud by William Mudford, the tightest science fiction story you will ever read.

#ButcherBilly #TalesfromtheSmith

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write Scary Short Stories?

The basic questioned posited as the title of this article may seem rudimentary to some, but to those new to Edgar Allan Poe it is not. The short (story) answer is that Edgar Allan Poe wrote many scary short stories. It's debatable which is his most popular, but surely these are in the Top Ten Poe short stories: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado."

Below is a complete list of Poe's short stories:

"A Tale of Jerusalem" (1832)
"Bon-Bon" (1832)
"Loss of Breath" (1832)
"Metzengerstein" (1832)
"The Duc de L'Omelette" (1832)
"Four Beasts in One" (1833)
"MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833)
"The Assignation" (1834)
"Berenice" (1835)
"King Pest" (1835)
"Lionizing" (1835)
"Morella" (1835)
"Shadow" (1835)
"Mystification" (1837)
"A Predicament" (1838)
"How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838)
"Ligeia" (1838)
"Silence - A Fable" (1838)
"The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839)
"The Devil in the Belfry" (1839)
"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)
"The Man That Was Used Up" (1839)
"Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (1839)
"William Wilson" (1839)
"[The Bloodhounds]" (1840)
"The Business Man" (1840)
"The Man of the Crowd" (1840)
"A Descent into the Maelström" (1841)
"Eleonora" (1841)
"Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (1841)
"The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841)
"The Island of the Fay" (1841)
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
"Three Sundays in a Week" (1841)
"The Gold-Bug" (1842)
"The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)
"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842)
"The Oval Portrait" (1842)
"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842)
"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1843)
"Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843)
"The Black Cat" (1843)
"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
"Mesmeric Revelation" (1844)
"Thou Art the Man" (1844)
"The Angel of the Odd" (1844)
"The Balloon-Hoax" (1844)
"The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844)
"The Oblong Box" (1844)
"The Premature Burial" (1844)
"The Purloined Letter" (1844)
"The Spectacles" (1844)
"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1844)
"Some Words with a Mummy" (1845)
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)
"The Imp of the Perverse" (1845)
"The Magazine Prison House" (1845)
"The Power of Words" (1845)
"[The Rats of Park Theatre]" (1845)
"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845)
"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
"The Domain of Arnheim" (1846)
"The Sphinx" (1846)"Hop-Frog" (1849)
"Landor's Cottage" (1849)
"Mellonta Tauta" (1849)
"Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849)
"X-ing a Paragrab" (1849)

#PoeShortStories #EdgarAllanPoe

Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe as Read by Jeff Buckley

Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe

One of my favorite Poe poems is "Ulalume" published in 1848. It is his only poem centered around October--a month Poe owns like no other. Read Edgar Allan Poe's annotated poems.

Check out this haunting reading by Jeff Buckley. It has a Jim Morrison feel.

Black Cat Song by Broadcast

Recently I posted Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" along with a photo of the house in Philadelphia where he wrote it. One of the best songs ever written about the scary short story is:

Song: Black Cat
Band: Broadcast

I'm sure Poe would have loved this song. Check it out on SoundCloud!

#BroadcastBlackCat #BlackCat #EdgarAllanPoe

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write a Werewolf Short Story?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote scary stories in a number of supernatural genres. He did not invent the horror short story, but he took it to unbelievable heights. Poe penned ghost stories. He was the first to invent a closed room murder mystery (The Murders in the Rue Morgue of 1841) and a founding father of science fiction short stories. Poe also was the first to take us inside the head of a crazy man in The Tell-Tale Heart of 1843.

Yet Edgar Allan Poe failed to cover a few crucial genres in his short stories. For instance, he did not write a vampire or monster story. I have blogged on the former in the past. That is unfortunate as I am convinced that no one could have written a vampire story like Poe. What's more, zombie's had not been created in Poe's time.

Unfortunately, Poe also did not write a werewolf story. Below is a list of werewolf stories originally published in the English language during Poe's lifetime, which he may have read. They are found in Transformation: The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849:

1831 The Man-Wolf by Leitch Ritche (1800-1865)
1846 A Story of a Weir-Wolf by Catherine Crowe (1790-1872)
1828 The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin by Richard Thomson (1794-1865)
1839 The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)
1838 Hugues the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages by Sutherland Menzies [Mrs. Elizabeth Stone] (1806-1883)

#WerewolfStories #BestWerewolfStories