The Tell-Tale Corpse

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (March 7, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0345448421
ISBN-13: 978-0345448422

The Mask of Red Death

Hardcover: August 3, 2004
320 pages
ISBN: 0345448413
Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1st edition

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (July 26, 2005)
ISBN-10: 0449007227
ISBN-13: 978-0449007228

It is the sweltering summer of 1845, and the thriving metropolis has fallen victim to a creature of the most inhuman depravity. Found days apart, two girls have been brutally murdered, their throats slashed, viciously scalped, and–most shocking of all–missing their livers. Edgar Allan Poe, despite what the tenor of his own tales of terror might suggest about his constitution, is just as shaken and revolted by these horrendous crimes as the panic-stricken public. Suspicion of the scalper’s identity immediately swirls around the most famous “redskin” in New York, Chief Wolf Bear, one of the human attractions at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. Certain that Chief Wolf Bear is innocent, Poe has deduced that the city is concealing a cannibal somewhere in its teeming masses, one with an ever-growing appetite for human prey.

Nevermore: A Novel

Mass Market Paperback: January, 2000
480 pages
ISBN: 0-671-79856-1
Publisher: Pocket Books

Praised by Caleb Carr for his "brilliantly detailed and above all riveting" true-crime writing, Harold Schechter brings his expertise to a marvelous work of fiction. Superbly rendering the 1830s Baltimore of Edgar Allan Poe, Schechter taps into the dark genius of that legendary author -- and follows a labyrinthine path into the heart of a most heinous crime.

A literary critic known for his scathing pen, Edgar Allan Poe is a young struggling writer, plagued by dreadful ruminations and horrific visions. Suddenly he is plunged into an adventure beyond his wildest fantasies -- a quest for a killer through Baltimore's highest and lowest streets and byways. A string of ghastly murders is linked by one chilling clue -- a cryptic word scrawled in blood. It is a terrifying lure that ensnares Poe in a deadly investigation. And along the way, his own macabre literary imagination is sparked as he unveils dark realities stranger than any fiction...

EXCERPT

The Hum Bug

Paperback: October 29, 2002
512 pages
ASIN: 0671041169
Publisher: Pocket Books

A literary genius...his realm of terror lies in the shadows of imagination.
A brilliant killer...his violence shatters the night streets -- and his knife's blade shows no mercy.
One will become a legend.
And one will meet a dark and grievous end.

Having proved his deductive brilliance solving Baltimore's notorious "Nevermore Murders," Edgar Allan Poe turns his investigative eye to the streets of mid-nineteenth century New York City. A young beauty with a shadowy past has been savagely murdered; her hideous wounds mirror a gruesome tableau in P.T. Barnum's wax exhibit -- and it is in defense of his own innocence that America's greatest showman has come to Poe for help. But neither the writer nor the huckster has anticipated the jagged maze that is the soul of a madman....

Harold Schechter, whose historical fiction "keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end" (The New York Times Book Review), adds a wry, pitch-perfect, and suspense-laced dimension to the fascinating life and times of the literary master of morbid, criminal motivation -- Edgar Allan Poe.

Outcry

Paperback: August 1, 1997
416 pages
ASIN: 067173217X
Publisher: Pocket Books

Investigating a series of brutal murders, reporter Paul Novak stumbles into the legend of Ed Gein, the "butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin," and follows local lore to the ramshackle home of a bizarre young man. Original. (Ingram)