After watching Mike Flanagan’s outstanding The Fall of the House of Usher, I felt compelled to revisit some Poe and look for references I’d missed on my watch through. I recognized the name Arthur Gordon Pym (the Usher attorney) but didn’t realize it was Poe’s only novel until looking deeper. With it being free on Audible I figured I had to give it a shot.
It’s weird as hell, first of all. And gruesome. Some of the most horrific scenes in any Poe story happen here: shark attacks, mutiny, cannibalism, starvation, thirst, ghost ships, Lovecraftian strangeness, Hollow Earth theory, near immurement. [Stefon voice] “This book has everything.”
Arthur Pym is a young man in Nantucket who dreams of adventure. After a drunken escapade, he and his best friend Augustus decide to scuttle away on a whaling ship, with Arthur stowing aboard. This immediately goes wrong, as a mutiny happens on day 4 and Arthur is left without food or water. Things only get worse from there. In spite of his being a soft little doofus from Nantucket, Arthur meets the moment, helping to take the ship back from the mutineers (with some other mutineers), enduring brutal thirst and hunger, and surviving through it all with the physically imposing Dirk Peters.
From there things only get weirder and weirder, with the world changing around Arthur as he approaches the southern pole, before the novel ends abruptly with phantasmagoric imagery and little else. In terms of construction, there are a shocking number of plot holes. Augustus doesn’t survive, but Arthur talks at some points about speaking with Augustus years later. His Newfoundland dog is on board one minute, then disappears another. It could be intentional and aiming for an unreliable narrator, but given how Poe soured on this work later in life, I think these are just mistakes. It inspired people none the less, with Herman Melville and Jules Verne both speaking of Arthur Pym as dear influences. Even Lovecraft borrowed from this, both with the mystique of the antarctic hiding untold wonders, and with the cry “Tekeli-li” that his Shoggoths utter. If nothing else, this story was influential, and Poe’s mastery as a writer shines through in this.
Read this if you’re a fan of Poe’s other work. Otherwise, give it a miss.