"In its unflnching examination of the terrors of the human soul, this homely narrative I begin today may well prove the equal of any I have yet penned."

So wrote the dying Edgar Allan Poe in the preface of a tale so macabre, so bizarre and yet so full of the people and events that formed him as to sweep away the boundary between fact an pioction.

Told in Poe's own literay style, this ficitonal memoir recreates in vivid detail his strange marriage and doomed attempt to make a living, his struggles with alcohol and battle against his sensuial nature. To preserve the innocence of his wife, Poe indulges his passion with a pair of mysterious foretune tellers, accompanied by generous draughts of opium. Poe is slowly drawn into the sordid under-life of old New York, where he is involved in a series of hideous murders.

Tracing the real killers through alleys and vack streets, Poe comes face to face with a terror not even he could not have invented.