Book Review: The Poe Shadow

     In the world of music, many times, a bands first album is their best.  Chances are they were touring for years with the same material when they finally land a record deal, giving them plenty of time to tweak and morph each song to perfection before stepping into the studio and laying them down for eternity.  The second album never lives up to its predecessor because the band is rushed into the studio for a follow up and forced to produce songs in a quarter of the time they had for the first one.  The world of writing is much different.  With each book an author usually builds on the lessons learned heading closer and closer to his or her masterpiece.  Matthew Pearl seems to be the rare novelist who fits in better with the rules of the music world then writing.  His first novel, The Dante Club, threw him suddenly to the top of the historical fiction genre.  It was an intriguing and exciting piece of literature that used historical characters to create a page turning mystery novel.  With his second novel, The Poe Shadow, Pearl took a huge step backwards.  Much like The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow uses real people and the very real mystery of Edgar Allen Poe's death to set up a fictional story about the deaths investigation.  Unlike The Dante Club, the novel struggles to establish a tone, leaving the characters to come off as farcical and unbelievable and the mystery lacking.  Cries of, "Come on," and questions like, "Am I supposed to be taking this serious," were common as I trudged through the books 384 pages.  By the time I reached the concluding chapters, I found myself not caring at all for the protagonist or the mystery he was working so hard to solve.  The mysterious conditions surrounding Poe's death seemed ripe for a deeply exciting page turner, but Pearl totally dropped the ball.  His biggest mistakes come with the character's he uses to push his story's plot along.  The main character, a Baltimore lawyer, Quentin Clark, is not interesting or compelling at all short of his one dimensional love of Poe's work.  The two major antagonists, Clark's best guesses at the possible inspiration for Poe's famous detective C. Auguste Dupin, both come off so comical and unbelievable the reader becomes lost over what the novel's tone is supposed to be.  Is it a suspenseful query into the death of one of America's greatest writers?  Or is it a comical farce about obsessed fans?  As high a bar as The Dante Club set, it seemed that Pearl was headed toward placement in the conversation about this generations best novelists, but that just isn't the case with The Poe Shadow.  Hopefully Pearl will find his stride with his next novel.  There are plenty of musicians who take time developing their third album, or sometimes their fourth, and are able to regain the magic of their first.  I hope Pearl follows this career path and not the one of the one hit wonder.