I recently checked out a book of short stories by American horror and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe. Included among the tales, featuring Masque of the Red Death, the Pit and the Pendulum, the Tell-Tale Heart, and the Raven, is Hop-Frog, originally published in 1849, the year of the author's mysterious premature death at age 40. His stories are full of murderous characters concocting different creative schemes of enacting revenge against their enemies: Hop-Frog is no exception. Set in a kingdom run by a tyrant with his councilors, Hop-Frog is the court jester, a dwarf with a defect causing his walk to resemble that of a toad or frog...hence the name. A young dwarf woman, Trippeta, has also been brought to the court and the two become friends. One day the king decides to play a cruel joke on Hop-Frog, who is well-known to not be able to drink alcohol without quickly becoming intoxicated. In the presence of the abetting councilors, he forces the jester to down drink after drink. When Trippeta steps up and implores the king to stop, he hits her and throws a drink in her face. Hop-Frog immediately sobers up and suggests to the evil king a practical joke that he and his councilors can play on the unsuspecting crowd in the upcoming masquerade party: they will all be dressed up as orangutans and will frighten the party-goers as they charge toward them. Of course, this is an Edgar Allan Poe story and we all know that Hop-Frog has something vengeful in mind, not at all good fun as the king and his cohorts believe...
Poe's stories display an intensity of horror for which I've found no match, not even in today's literary world overflowing with horror writers. Hop-Frog fits this pattern, although I originally began reading it thinking okay, here's a story placed in a fairy tale setting that isn't about some twisted soul committed a ghastly revenge murder on an unsuspecting victim. Oh well, the author obviously had issues of his own to deal with, and apparently this kind of writing worked for him. Upon reading Hop-Frog, I discovered that Poe wrote it with a fellow writer in mind (along with her literary friends) whom he had accused of spreading scurrilous gossip about him regarding another woman. I don't particularly care for the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, but I may go over some of his other, more famous stories just because he is a historical figure in American literature...and then return the book...
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