Rating: 
Summary: Very poor
Review: Edgar Allan Poe's strange death in 1849 has always been highly contraversial. There have been so many theories, some plausiable some not so plausiable. Mr. Walsh does a very crediable job in returning the reader back to Poe's time, reviewing all the witnesses and presenting his theory soundly. His writing at least in the beginning is a bit strange, he uses paragraph's were normally one would see a period. I believe this is a attempt in another way to capture the spirit of Poe, the mystery, the macabe, the sad end. Still, Mr. Walsh deserve's credit for producing a very quick and interesting read..
Rating: 
Summary: A plausible and well documented explanation of how Poe died
Review: Edgar Allen Poe's death has not lacked for theories. Now Walsh presents a solution that has many appealing elements. The most generally accepted theory of Poe's death has been death through alcoholic intoxication something easy to assume with someone having the long history on binge drinking. The problem is that Poe was in a good place in his life, his proposal of marriage having been accepted by his childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow and was traveling north on a job that would earn him substantial income.Whether or not Walsh's explanation covers all the evidence in a reasonable way is for the jury of readers to determine. The book presents the documentation in readable form. I found it easy to follow Walsh's logic as buttressed by the evidence. I recommend this book for anyone interested in the dissection of an old murder and a reconsideration of the evidence.
Rating:
Summary: A plausible and well documented explanation of how Poe died
Review: Edgar Allen Poe's death has not lacked for theories. Now Walsh presents a solution that has many appealing elements. The most generally accepted theory of Poe's death has been death through alcoholic intoxication something easy to assume with someone having the long history on binge drinking. The problem is that Poe was in a good place in his life, his proposal of marriage having been accepted by his childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow and was traveling north on a job that would earn him substantial income. Whether or not Walsh's explanation covers all the evidence in a reasonable way is for the jury of readers to determine. The book presents the documentation in readable form. I found it easy to follow Walsh's logic as buttressed by the evidence. I recommend this book for anyone interested in the dissection of an old murder and a reconsideration of the evidence.
Rating: 
Summary: Evangelism astray
Review: First and foremost: John Evangelist Walsh does not write well. He loves the skewed sentence and frail subject-verb current, the vague reference and imprecise noun. He also occasionally boasts of his investigatory prowess and belittles other critics for their blindness. But the reason for all this stylistic lameness becomes clear in the second half of MIDNIGHT DREARY; he is hamstrung by the lameness of his thesis, which is that Sarah Royster's brothers followed Poe around,force-fed him whisky and beat him to the verge of death to protect her from this womanizing drunkard.
The mysteries of Poe's whereabouts during his last days and why he was found delirious and battered in someone else's clothes in a Baltimore public house have long intrigued readers, and Walsh begins with some reasonable mustering of the known (and even the less accessible) evidence. He brings to light some documents often dismissed in the case and builds upon them, but when the avaiable information thins out, Walsh fills in with fiction, a dramatic tale which is distinguished by neither its presentation of characters nor its vividness.
If Walsh had set out to write an entertaining fancy, he might have succeeded, though it's difficult to believe his writing would have been less tortured. Had he contented himself to gather and display the evidence, both the popular documents and the more obscure ones, he might have performed a service, for the mystery of Poe's death is not fully solved by the common assumption of election press gangs and "cooping" of indigents to vote them over and over. But he has chosen to claim high drama and earth-shaking discovery.
The result has more in common with evangelism than scholarship. Walsh has a theory to sell, and he will say anything to convince the reader who is unfamiliar with the biographies. He combines the arbitrary and the desperately speculative into a net that cannot hold even the smallest fish. Even if Silverman's MOURNFUL AND NEVER-ENDING REMEMBRANCE is not the last word, compared to it, MIDNIGHT DREARY is an entertaining footnote.
Rating:
Summary: Doesn't deliver
Review: I found this in the True Crime Section and expected an interesting read. I never found it. What I received instead was a detailed description of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe leading up to, what I thought would be an interesting and definitive conclusion, nothing. The book just leaves the reader to swallow the author's boring hypothesis. This is a case where the truth is NOT stranger than fiction (at least in this presentation).
Rating: 
Summary: A compelling read
Review: I just finished this compelling book here on a sultry Saturday afternoon in August; nothing could have been better. Knowing very little of literary matters or much about E.A. Poe (except The Raven and Annibel Lee in 9th grade), I found this book to be riveting. I had not known of the mystery of his death or any of the theories pertaining to it. But having worked most of my life in mental health as a professional, I found myself more and more, as I sped through the book, asking myself whether this man might have been suffering from mental illness, certainly alcoholism as we know it today. The experiences and symptoms described of Poe by Walsh appear as classic examples of Bipolar Disorder or an agitated Major Depression with psychotic (paranoid) features. People who don't take their medication and who suffer from Major Mental Illness may often be "dually diagnosed" with substance abuse perhaps to self-medicate. The absence of real, tangible evidence in history to support the hypothesis that Poe was followed by Elmira's vindictive brothers during an agitated lost 5 days along the Eastern Seaboard, contributed to my obsessing about the possibility that just maybe Poe suffered from an agitated psychotic depression and had landed in Baltimore that October, 1849 having succumbed to alcohol poisoning. What a fabulous tale, but the sad mystery remains. And what a sad event for American history. And, oh, by the way, I found Walsh's writing to flow like a bounding river.
Rating:
Summary: Now I can stop guessing..."Forevermore"
Review: John Walsh's book is certainly a good read and the only people who seem to have trouble with it are people who don't understand that all the pieces of the puzzle aren't available and never will be. In situations like that, good investigative work has to be used--along with a good understanding of your subject and the times to make up situations not known. John Walsh certainly has both. I was thoroughly enthralled by his storytelling and even more impressed by his deductions and his careful telling of where he got his information. Of course, there are some things he doesn't know so he deduced them based on the knowledge at hand. If done intelligently (as done here), it will convince the reader. I think Edgar Allen Poe would rest easy knowing someone finally straightened out his last days.
Rating:
Summary: Now I can stop guessing..."Forevermore"
Review: John Walsh's book is certainly a good read and the only people who seem to have trouble with it are people who don't understand that all the pieces of the puzzle aren't available and never will be. In situations like that, good investigative work has to be used--along with a good understanding of your subject and the times to make up situations not known. John Walsh certainly has both. I was thoroughly enthralled by his storytelling and even more impressed by his deductions and his careful telling of where he got his information. Of course, there are some things he doesn't know so he deduced them based on the knowledge at hand. If done intelligently (as done here), it will convince the reader. I think Edgar Allen Poe would rest easy knowing someone finally straightened out his last days.
Rating:
Summary: A compelling read
Review: Midnight Dreary seems to be separated into two different books: the first half is a fairly well-documented reconstruction of Poe's last days, including many details that I'd never read before. Unfortunately, the second book takes this sparse information and attempts to craft it into some earth-shattering thesis as to how Poe died. It fails miserably. Walsh takes his tiny pieces of evidence and surrounds them with so much conjecture and just plain old made up stuff that the entire book is tarnished. I will give but one example, although there are many: while it may be true that Walsh shows SOME small evidence that Poe was followed by his fiancee's brothers, where exactly does he come up with the bizarre scenario in which they trap him in his room and MAKE him drink a bottle of whiskey in order to tarnish his image? He presents No, that is zero, evidence that this is the case. That is just shoddy research work. Walsh's presentation of Poe's final days is riddled with such leaps of faith and ridiculous, undocumented conclusions, lending it absolutely no validity whatsoever. It's a shame too, because Walsh had enough shreds of evidence to frame the beginnings of a portrait and to start a good, scholarly debate. Unfortunately, he tried to hang the picture before it was finished.
Rating:
Summary: Two books
Review: Midnight Dreary seems to be separated into two different books: the first half is a fairly well-documented reconstruction of Poe's last days, including many details that I'd never read before. Unfortunately, the second book takes this sparse information and attempts to craft it into some earth-shattering thesis as to how Poe died. It fails miserably. Walsh takes his tiny pieces of evidence and surrounds them with so much conjecture and just plain old made up stuff that the entire book is tarnished. I will give but one example, although there are many: while it may be true that Walsh shows SOME small evidence that Poe was followed by his fiancee's brothers, where exactly does he come up with the bizarre scenario in which they trap him in his room and MAKE him drink a bottle of whiskey in order to tarnish his image? He presents No, that is zero, evidence that this is the case. That is just shoddy research work. Walsh's presentation of Poe's final days is riddled with such leaps of faith and ridiculous, undocumented conclusions, lending it absolutely no validity whatsoever. It's a shame too, because Walsh had enough shreds of evidence to frame the beginnings of a portrait and to start a good, scholarly debate. Unfortunately, he tried to hang the picture before it was finished.
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