more than intertextuality

I decided to kill off some time before dinner by reading M.P. Shiel’s “The House of Sounds,” one of the stories in that “Lovecraft’s Favorites” volume.

Normally, nothing bores me more than the gesture of: “Hey! This author stole that idea from X!”, which more often than not is just a pompous, pseudointellectual showoff routine by people who read too much and produce too little. (You know, it’s all been said before by someone else, so I’m not to blame for just reading all the time and cutting down everyone who actually tries to write something, because they’re all cheaters anyway.)

But in the case of Shiel’s story, I think we can definitely say he’s been reading a little too much of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. In fact, when I turned the page and found the first of the following passages, for about 5 seconds I was sure there had been a printer’s error and Poe had been wrongly inserted into the midst of Shiel’s story.

“I mentioned the case to my friend, Haco Harfager, then occupying with me an old mansion in St. Germain, shut in by a wall and jungle of shrubbery.”

He can’t even change the neighborhood from Poe!

And even more:

“From first days when we happened to attend the same seminary in Stockholm an intimacy had sprung up between us. But it was not an intimacy accompanied by the normal signs of friendship… Though our joint housekeeping (brought about by our chance meeting at a midnight séance) had now lasted some months, I knew nothing of his plans. Through the day we read together, he rapt back into the past, I engrossed with the present; late at night we reclined on sofas within the vast cave of a hearth-place Louis Onze, and smoked over the dying fire in silence.”

Really, it feels to me like an entry from a Poe impersonation contest. But I’ve already read what Lovecraft thinks of the plot, and it seems promising. But I think I’ll leave the rest until after dinner.