My First (Literary) Crush

Everyone remembers their first crush.

For me, crushes extended into the literary world as well. My first? Edgar Allan Poe.

There was something about his brooding, melancholy, darkly romantic style that captured me. The first short story of his I remember reading was “The Cask of Amontillado” in 7th grade. We were learning about “foreshadowing” and “dramatic irony” back then. I tried my hand at writing a female version of “The Cask.” In the original story, the reader is never exactly told what “injuries” were done to Montresor by Fortunado. In mine, the cause of revenge was a stolen boyfriend. (Cut me some slack, I was in 7th grade!)

The next Poe story that simply fascinated me was “The Masque of the Red Death.” If you’ve never read it, you must read it now. It is one of the coolest short stories ever written. I just went ga-ga over the color symbolism, was intrigued by the macabre nature of having a masquerade party during a plague, and was morbidly thrilled by the utter irony of the ending.

Then, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The narrator of this story is what endeared me. He continually implies that the person to whom he is directing his narrative must believe him to be “mad.” He is so intent on justifying his actions, and the way he explains everything in such painstaking, ordered detail seems worlds apart from the scattered rantings of a madman. But the guy is absolutely nuts. That’s what’s great about this story to me—the play between the obviously insane state of mind of the narrator and the precise, proud way he talks about his hideous actions as if they were normal and justified.

The last Poe short story that I remember really getting excited about right before my crush abated was “The Pit and the Pendulum.” A lot of tension builds as a swinging, scimitar-like blade slowly descends upon the narrator who is trapped in a dungeon during the Spanish Inquisition. The way that he escapes his fate just as the blade begins to cut him is ingenious.

Eventually, as happens with most crushes, I got over EAP, and in 9th grade became desperately smitten with another literary love. Though my introduction to him was pretty typical, Romeo and Juliet, I didn’t get butterflies in my stomach until Julius Caesar. Yeah, the Bard has that effect on people, I suppose.

Are there any literary crushes you reminisce about from time to time?