The title of one of the stories, -Possessed- strikes the keynote of the collection, whose characters are possessed by obsessions, visions, aliens, violence, madness, love, death; and, in that keynote story, in a kind of demented self-portrait of the protagonist himself (see -The Murder of Charlotte Master- and -The Spirit of Melancholy-), the character is possessed by the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe. But there is more than the resurrection of Poe here; there is a skillful evocation of unique individuals and particular places in the cities and small towns of the Pacific Northwest and the West,...