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Popular Culture Review
the wall, then grabbed the torch and hastily made his way through the rat’s nest
of tunnels to the ancient stairwell. . ( 6 8 4 ) . The relation to the ancient
Montresor vaults and events of the story are again unmistakable.
The next characteristics found in Poe’s horror fiction which are evident in
Preston and Child’s series are the gruesome murders. Both sets of writers
implement similar methods of murder and deception in order to demonstrate the
depravity of their criminals and because “. . . the secret vault, and the sealed
room—all conventional scenes of Gothic mystery—evoke anxiety because they
pose the implicit threat of fatal enclosure” (Kennedy 115). To force the reader to
address this innate fear of enclosure, entombment behind a brick wall seems to
be a common favorite method of murder and/or disposal of a corpse. In both
“Cask of Amontillado” and Brimstone, characters are chained to a cold, damp,
ancient stone wall while alive, and are then taunted by their captors as they
watch them, layer by layer, pile up the new brick wall that will act the final
crypt. Lastly, in Cabinet o f Curiosities, the first sight of atrocities in the novel
was the 36 sets of bones found concealed within 12 underground charnels.
These remains were found to be buried post-mortem, like the victim in “The
Black Cat.” This elaborate method of murdering and hiding bodies is quite
complicated and usually not practiced by fictional killers in books, which makes
the use by Preston and Child reminiscent of Poe’s tales.
Dismemberment was another effect of death common between Poe’s old
text and Preston and Child’s new one. Poe uses dismemberment with his murder
in “The Tell-Tale Heart”; the narrator explains that “I dismembered the corpse. I
cut off the head and the arms and the legs” (388). The dismemberment of
corpses is repeated in Cabinet o f Curiosities with the 36 sets of remains found in
the charnels. These bodies were “dismembered in the same fashion, at the neck,
shoulders, and hips” (31). In conjunction with the other evidence, this method of
dismemberment used for corpse disposal in Cabinet o f Curiosities could
arguably have been inspired by Poe’s earlier example.
The third horrific correlation between Poe and Preston and Child’s texts
addressing gruesome deaths, following entombment and then dismemberment, is
also one of the examples of hybridization of horror and detective genres initiated
by Poe. In “Murders of the Rue Morgue,” the monster responsible for the
graphically violent deaths of the two women was a freakishly strong, primitive
Ourang-Outang. The creature responsible for the gruesome series of murders in
Still Life with Crows was a freakishly strong, primitive, asocial human being
named Job. Though the killer of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was an animal,
he was trying to emulate human behavior with “Razor in hand, and fully
lathered, it was sitting before the looking-glass, attempting the operation of
shaving . . . ” (310). Job also mimics humanity with his recreation of the scenes
from his nursery rhyme book, the only exposure to the outside world of people
he ever experienced. He was just trying to play with people and then mistakenly
killed them; in one instance, he stuffed the body of the victim with crows and
stitched it up to animate the rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence, / A pocket full of