Days When My Heart Was Volcanic

"[James Spada's] fascinating first novel," writes Garth Von Buchholz, founder of The International Edgar Allen Poe Society, "Days When My Heart Was Volcanic" (the title itself taken from Poe's ballad, Ulalume) deftly blends fact and fiction by setting the story at a critical juncture in Poe's personal and professional life.... Days is an excellent, credible and well-researched book. Spada ties in many of the real characters and events during this period in Poe's life, and even Poe himself is startlingly accurate and three-dimensional without leading too far into myths and speculation. The real pleasure for those who are interested in Poe is, however, the way in which Spada animates the more shadowy character of Virginia... The Virginia Poe in Spada's novel is an alluring, confident and intelligent young woman."

Narrating the story is handsome twenty-year-old student Jeremiah Delaney, an aspiring poet for whom his idol Poe becomes a mentor. The moment Jeremiah meets Poe's beautiful young wife, he falls obsessively, dangerously in love with her. At the same time he is caught up in Poe's downward spiral into depression, alcohol and opium. Both of these factors, one in Jeremiah's control and the other out of it, set in motion a series of events that threatens to destroy him. "I know in my heart that I am as much at fault as Mr. Poe," Jeremiah admits as he begins this reminiscence. "I cannot blame him more than I blame myself for what knowing him made me desire, made me become, made me do." In this by turns romantic, harrowing, and elegiac novel, best-selling Hollywood biographer James Spada turns his eye to a 19th century celebrity. "Spada's scholarly research and his eye for the period," continues Von Buchholz, "makes every page of the novel incandescent."

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