The illustrations

Poe’s deviants lived in the real world, and that’s how I’m going to show them.

Honoring the stories’ emphasis on verisimilitude, the graphite drawings that comprise the illustrations will all be based on drawings from life and photos of real people.

The number of illustrations included in the volumes will vary based on the length of the stories, but you can count on each story including a frontispiece and a story opener.

Poe observed that writers have two general methods of dealing with the supernatural.

The first is to treat the narrative “in a jocular manner throughout” and to explain away the details “by means of a dream, or something similar.”

The second, which he preferred, consisted in:

1. “avoiding directness of expresion ... in writing as if the author were impressed with the truth of the wonders he relates ... in minuteness of detail ... in short, by making use of the infinity of arts which give verisimilitude to a narration.”
   

In short, you have to let the reader know you take the story seriously – no matter how outrageous.