Special Guest Blogger: Edgar Allan Poe

It was upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary one turbulent, inky night in Autumn. The silence only occasionally interrupted by the woeful cry of a long-suffering animal in the distance as i stumbled along through a landscape of unremitting bleakness in a drunken stupor, the leaves whirling around my stumbling frame as i fell a final time onto the rain-sodden earth.
I lay on my back, the water soaking into my thin, thread-worn coat and stared up to the heavens, the shimmering stars seeming to mock me in my harrowing fate.
Several travelers in the night hurried past me, a drunken wretch prostrate on the ground but while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping a kindly traveler who came to my aide, and i was taken to seek comfort inside a hospital but before i had chance to ponder the horrible fates that would befall wicked souls, i died, darkness there and nothing more.
To be fair, everyone who knew me saw that coming, i was thought to be permanently on the booze and opium, and lived a tormented existence where i would frequently venture out to wander the streets in the dead of night.
It fits, men who write weird horror stories are surely on drugs but i wasn't, my editor, Rufus Griswold, despised me and he wrote my obituary and all that bullshit but it's more appealing to think of me as a tragic, dark, self-destructive, strange figure.
The Raven is amongst my best known works but 'The Cask Of Amontillado' is one of my most favourites and is based on a fued i had with Thomas Dunn English who would spoof me in his stories, making out i was a crazy drunk so i wrote a charcater for him who was chained to a wall and left to die, gently mock me in fiction would he.
They were unable to find an actual cause of death so put it down to 'cerebral inflammation' but they didn't really know and speculation included severe alcohol withdrawal symptoms, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera and rabies but whatever it was, i shall be lifted nevermore!