The Port-Wine Stain

A young surgical assistant faces his doppelgänger in a chilling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe and a “lost” Poe story.

In his third stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the power...