Edgar A. Poe — The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Arthur Gordon Pym's seafaring career is doomed from the start. Just after surviving a carelessly drunken sailing trip on a stormy night with great difficulty, the young man from Nantucket smuggles himself aboard a whaler as a stowaway.
In doing so, Pym seems to have a premonition of what awaits him: "My visions of the future dealt with shipwreck and hunger, of death or captivity among barbaric hordes, of a life languishing full of sorrow and tears on a grey desolate rock island, unreachable in an unknown ocean."
The adventurous spirit and his melancholic temperament drive the youth, who is all too eager to break free from his respectable circumstances, into a self-fulfilling prophecy: After only a few days at sea, a bloody mutiny breaks out on board. Barely suppressed, the whaler is shipwrecked in a storm.
For weeks, Pym endures on the wooden remnants, becoming a cannibal and finally being picked up by a passing sailor, more dead than alive. In no time, he recovers and joins the expedition towards the Antarctic, where painful deprivation and supernatural horror lurk in the southern polar wilderness.
The rest is world literature. This is evidenced by the reception history of "Arthur Gordon Pym's Adventures". The novel influenced contemporaries such as H.P. Lovecraft, Herman Melville, and Jules Verne, who even wrote a sequel.
Ernest Hemingway studied in Pym the disillusionment of a young man. Paul Auster and Roberto Bolaño learned that great books never reveal the secrets around which they revolve.
Poe connects components of adventure story and anti-education novel. He presents an unreliable narrator presenting a travelogue that can also be read as a study on the chaos-inducing power of alcohol. And all this in the artful guise of a fragment.
But not only does the form present itself unashamedly modern. The author also depicts the essence of despair and horror in such a way that the cruelties exceed themselves on every new page. The "Conditio humana" (nature of man) is no longer questioned by Poe.
Without intending to offer comfort, he describes the human's sense of loss, who stands perplexed before the great void. Those who can still laugh with Franz Kafka will marvel at how hopeless and almost physically painful literature can be in an age of boundless visual representations of violence.
 
Crafted by London-based tattoo artist Kat Jennings, the cover of "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" adds another haunting dimension to our esteemed collection of Horror Classics. Jennings' mastery in bringing tales to life is evident in her previous works, including her captivating interpretations of "The Vampyre" and "The Golem."