I picked this up so that I could read Pym: A Novel, but it's weirdly compelling in its own right. With the novel-plotting skill of a born short story writer, Poe plunges through a succession of genres and tones, from boys'-own-naval adventure story to survival horror to Jules Verne-like exploratory proto-SF, all wrapped in that crunchy shell of found-document author-uncertainty that was postmodern before there was postmodernism (or modernism, for that matter).

Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, our titular narrator, is so deficient in anything resembling a conventional character development arc that one is tempted to conclude that he must be a real person after all, albeit the victim of some kind of psychotic break prompted by deeply traumatic events. The most significant disjunction, to my mind, occurs when Pym is rescued from the shipwreck by the Jane Guy. It seems scarcely credible to me that, so far from expressing the slightest desire to return to his native Nantucket upon his recovery, he is the one to urge the captain to head for the Antarctic. The extensive interlude consisting almost entirely of latitude and longitude readings simultaneously describing the progress of the Guy and a history of various other excursions into the region that is here foisted upon the reader could be read as the perseveration of a trauma victim.

Then there is the episode on the island of Tsalal, which is a potent brew of psychedelic racism that would not be equaled until H. P. Lovecraft, whose At the Mountains of Madness homages Pym, even including the cries of "tekeli-li!" (In the interest of full disclosure, I got that information off Wikipedia and my closest experiences with Lovecraft involve wearing various Lovecraft-inspired perfume oils from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.)

Finally, there is the ending, or non-ending, of the book, which crashes to an abrupt halt with a handful of diagrams and a flurry of footnotes as figleaves for its nakedness. Having followed the action of the novel thus far, one might readily imagine that Poe had written himself into a corner and was more than ready to stop adding new incidents to the narrative, but first he teases a reference to Symmes's Hollow Earth which, if you are me, you may be familiar with from The White Darkness. I was definitely expecting this subject matter to make up more than approximately one sentence of the novel.

A bizarre, glorious and provocative failure. I feel like I can see why Mat Johnson felt the urge to write an entire book in response to it.