May 21
Raoul Comments: “Just wanted to let you know I’m in the Olympic torch relay! Now I’ll wall you back up.”
Published 1988
Raoul Comments: “Just wanted to let you know I’m in the Olympic torch relay! Now I’ll wall you back up.”
Published 1988
May 21st, 2018 at 9:57 am
If your mansion house needs haunting, just call… Rentaghost!
May 21st, 2018 at 10:52 am
“I pity the fool!”
“Ha ha. That never gets old.”
May 21st, 2018 at 11:59 am
“Please unchain me. Promise the King I’ll stop doing improv.”
May 21st, 2018 at 1:27 pm
You’d think, after the lambasting ‘Gotham’ got, that a prequel to ‘Green Hornet’ set in the 1430s would have been stopped as soon as the pitch was in.
May 21st, 2018 at 1:43 pm
Revenge is a dish worst served cosplay.
May 21st, 2018 at 1:48 pm
This is painful to look at. For one, this is not at all how Montresor is dressed in the story, where he is in a long black cape, a “roquelaire.” Fortunato, the guy in chains, is an aristocratic fool, not a pudgy knock off of the Maytag repairman.The story is hysterically funny enough on its own, but this cover reduces it to cheesy slapstick. I apologize for breaking the 4th wall and commenting on the text, but I love Poe so much that I can’t help myself.
May 21st, 2018 at 1:57 pm
…including “The Fall of the House of Isher” (a story about the bankruptcy of a famous weapon shop)
May 21st, 2018 at 2:02 pm
I’ll let you all in on a little known and very dark secret: the real spine tingler about this scene is our poor harlequin is actually Frank from the Department of Public Works, who came to the Tor offices years ago to do a monthly water quality inspection, and has been held captive in the darkest recesses of the Art Department, posing against his will for their silliest covers. Some people say if you turn on all the faucets in the Executive Suite ladies’ room at the same time, you can hear his eerie moans of protest at the ridiculous costumes he’s forced to wear rising up through the pipes.
/true story.
May 21st, 2018 at 2:24 pm
@Lillie A (8)—Thank you for the inside story. You have redeemed the cover for me, sort of. 😉
May 21st, 2018 at 3:21 pm
If Mel Brooks had a go at Poe…
May 21st, 2018 at 6:32 pm
@MakkaPakka #7 – Good show sir!
May 21st, 2018 at 7:09 pm
Well, it certainly brings out homoerotic subtext in Poe’s stories. Which according to Google is totally a thing.
May 22nd, 2018 at 1:36 am
For the love of God, Paul Jennis!
I don’t remember any jesters in any of Poe’s works.
I wonder if this art was intended for some other book (which did have harlequins) and someone said, “Hey, dude’s walled up, let’s use it for Poe.” We have come across cases of that before.
@Tat (4): It might be a prequel to Green Arrow. Who I think exists in the same universe (sometimes) as Harley Quinn. Who the chained dude might follow.
Yes, the DC Extended Universe makes more sense than this cover.
@MakkaPakka (7): GSS! Impressive.
@Lillie (8): All is explained. I wanna ask Teresa Nielsen Hayden about the faucets in the ladies’ room now.
@Francis (12): There’s nowt so queer as Poe?
Eesh. I just now noticed the font. More horrific than some of the stories.
May 22nd, 2018 at 7:07 am
Martin Short in the role of a lifetime!
May 22nd, 2018 at 1:30 pm
@GSSxn—Well, Fortunato (the victim in chains) does seem to be dressed like a jester: “The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells.” That’s part of the story’s irony, like the name Fortunato itself. But he doesn’t look anything like this guy, I’ll wager. By the way, Poe seems to have invented the word “parti-striped” in this sentence.
Sorry to be a geek—occupational hazard.
May 22nd, 2018 at 3:57 pm
GSSxn: Hop-Frog, which I don’t blame you for forgetting. Not a real pleasant story, even by Poe’s standards..
May 22nd, 2018 at 11:02 pm
@BC: But did Montresor look like a cut-rate Renaissance Robin Hood?
@L_l: I absolutely don’t remember that.
Must confess that my earliest exposure to Poe was the Saturday afternoon Creature Features on TV, the Roger Corman movies with Vincent Price.
May 23rd, 2018 at 1:25 am
@GSSxn—Those movies weren’t half bad. Corman and Price were geniuses of a certain type. And no, Montresor doesn’t look like this walking inanity. He does have the “black silken mask” but his main garment is the (we assume also black) roquelaire—a voluminous knee-length hooded robe.
May 23rd, 2018 at 3:00 am
@A. R. Yngve (#14)
That’s it! I was trying to figure out who the guy on the left was. The guy with the torch looks like Eric Idle to me….
May 23rd, 2018 at 11:15 pm
Torch guy could be either Eric Idle or David Tennant. Either in a wacky team-up with Martin Short would be entertaining, but nothing like “Cask of…”
@BC (18): I still have a fondness for them, microbudget and all. And Vincent Price was a treasure.
May 24th, 2018 at 2:33 am
Obviously the guy on the left is Jimmy Durante.
May 24th, 2018 at 2:10 pm
Ah, this must be illustrating the previously undiscovered alternative ending to The Cask Of Amontillado, where Fortunato’s best friend knocks a hole in the wall to rescue him. No wonder they both look so happy!
May 25th, 2018 at 12:19 am
“Dude! Montresor was drunk off his ass and bragging about how he walled you up, so I grabbed a torch and a sledgehammer! C’mon back to the party!”
May 29th, 2018 at 8:21 pm
“For the the second ‘L’ in ‘collection’ let’s use a totally different font to the rest of the word – including the first ‘L’, for, you know, reasons …”
And chosing “A Collection of Stories” as a title, displays a lack of, well, mystery and imagination. Plus “Welcome to your nightmares” as a tag line – shouldn’t there be an adjective before ‘nightmares’?
Taken with the insipid cover, clearly nobody was trying very hard.