Poe

Poe's brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightening strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion

Observer

200 pages of beautifully concentrated and cadenced prose

Glasgow Herald

Ackroyd tells his story straight, without moralising

Literary Review

Mr Ackroyd's biography of a writer who dies at the age of 40 after an alcoholic bender is almost as vivid and flawed as Poe himself ... Mr Ackroyd is especially good at conveying Poe's precarious state

Economist

Ackroyd is clearly fascinated by his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe

Scotland on Sunday

With an adept ventriloquism Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony with his own crisp narrative...a vivid recreation of the life and sensibility that lay behind the work

Evening Standard

Poe is an ideal biographical subject for Peter Ackroyd... Admirably captures the heady mix of the esoteric, grotesque and thoroughly modern in Poe

Sunday Times

Ackroyd is more like a literary spiritualist who summons up the voices of the dead and encourages them to possess his writing... It is as short and sharp as a flick-knife

Daily Telegraph

Ackroyd is clearly fascinated by his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe

Scotland on Sunday

With an adept ventriloquism, Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony and his own crisp narrative... His own elegant, even terse, prose mirrors his subject's best, whilst it is also shot through with Poe's anguish

Scotsman

Such a Hammer horror biography - a veritable car-crash of a life - is tailor-made for a writer such as Ackroyd. He sustains its intensity in these 160 pages

Sunday Telegraph