A Strange Narrative

I have been an avid reader of Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne since childhood, and have enjoyed H.P. Lovecraft since I was a teen. Last March, through an accidental double order, I acquired a Nook Color, to which I added an N2A card to turn the Nook into an Android tablet.

One of several apps I installed was Aldiko, a book reader. Among the free books on Aldiko were many works of Verne. After reading two of Verne's works that I had not read before, I began to read An Antarctic Adventure. Upon reading the introduction, imagine my surprise to discover that this book was written as a continuation to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket!

Owing to my obsessive/compulsive tendencies, I now was obligated to first read Poe. Which I did. Having read the book on my Nook, I was then driven to do a bit of web-crawling. (The Wikipedia article on this book may be found here.) Next, I read An Antarctic Adventure. Parentically, I had previously read H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness two or three times, so the cry noted in Pym, tekeli-li, was immediately familiar since it figures prominently in the final chapters of Mountains.

What is strange about this, my narrative, is that while I had read almost all of Poe and many works by Verne, I had never read these two particular novels. Moreover, two of my life-long favorite authors had written stories that were intimately connected. Verne's book was set 13 years after Poe's, and is a search for those unaccounted for at the end of Poe's. Verne was, apparently, having been a great admirer of Poe and had drawn on Poe for several of his (Verne's) works -- this connection also being formerly unknown to me. And, "Poe's novel was also an influence on Lovecraft, whose 1936 novel At the Mountains of Madness follows similar thematic direction and borrows the cry tekeli-li from the novel." Wikipedia.

A fourth novel, A Strange Discovery, by Charles Romeyn Dake, follows a branch of Pym, accounts for the missing years of one of the Pym/Adventure characters, Dirk Peters. I have this bookmarked at Project Gutenburg for reading next.

Yet another strange connection is that between Pym and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Critic Patrick F. Quinn writes that there were enough similarities that Melville must have studied Poe's novel and, if not, it would be "one of the most extraordinary accidents in literature." I should note that I have read Moby Dick at least once a decade since I was 10.

I find all this weird.