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A review by pn_hinton
His Hideous Heart: 13 of Edgar Allan Poe's Most Unsettling Tales Reimagined by Dahlia Adler
5.0
This is yet another one that I knew about months in advance and waited patiently for it to come out. YA and Poe? Sounds like a recipe for greatness and this book did not disappoint. Honestly, I ended up liking twelve out of the thirteen retellings. The only one I didn’t enjoy was the retelling of ‘The Raven’ and a lot of that has to do with just not being a fan of amanda lovelace’s poetry style at all. That is arguably one of Poe’s better-known poems and I feel more could have been done with retelling it. But I digress.
What really sold this for me is that you could see the nods to Poe in every single retelling; even the ones that I hadn’t ready before, and there were a few, evoked the spirit of Poe and Gothic Horror. And it was interesting to see how the themes from the originals held up in this current time. And none of them, save for ‘The Raven’, were just straight retells. They took the base of the story and put their own spin on them. I started to list the standouts but realized (again save for one) that I found all these retellings were amazing in their own way. I don’t think anyone will be disappointed if they pick this up and read it; if anything, they’d want more.
This is the perfect book to read this time of the year and, as a bonus, the originals are included in the back. I didn’t read those since I wanted to return the book to the library so that the next person in line could enjoy it, but I would recommend reading them after the retellings so you can see how the homages were paid to them. This collection shows that Poe and the stories he told are timeless and will be around for a long, long time.
What really sold this for me is that you could see the nods to Poe in every single retelling; even the ones that I hadn’t ready before, and there were a few, evoked the spirit of Poe and Gothic Horror. And it was interesting to see how the themes from the originals held up in this current time. And none of them, save for ‘The Raven’, were just straight retells. They took the base of the story and put their own spin on them. I started to list the standouts but realized (again save for one) that I found all these retellings were amazing in their own way. I don’t think anyone will be disappointed if they pick this up and read it; if anything, they’d want more.
This is the perfect book to read this time of the year and, as a bonus, the originals are included in the back. I didn’t read those since I wanted to return the book to the library so that the next person in line could enjoy it, but I would recommend reading them after the retellings so you can see how the homages were paid to them. This collection shows that Poe and the stories he told are timeless and will be around for a long, long time.