Foiled!

So this past week, I've been hatching a weird screenplay to write about Edger Allan Poe's last days —he was found drunk and dying in a gutter, in somebody's else's clothes (they didn't fit). I figured it would be fun to take that as a starting point, and spin it off into a poe-esque tale, in which Poe was presumed dead, buried alive, and then escaped only to find himself in increasingly surreal and poe-esque situations. Cool idea, huh?

Apparently there was a novel sort of like that in 1995, in which,

The novel opens with Poe narrating his voyage aboard a steamer from Norfolk to Baltimore...These passages are intercut by third-person scenes in which the story takes a decidedly metaphysical—and convoluted—turn, as Marlowe tells the tale of a second Poe who is not in Baltimore but in Paris. In this shadow life, Poe's brother, who has not died, disappears under odd circumstances, prompting the writer to engage Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin (of "The Purloined Letter" fame) to investigate. Dupin is baffled by the case, but Poe finds a mysterious stone shard in his brother's flat that leads him to an unusual young woman—and to still other alternate lives, to a distant island where an indigenous tribe has been bereft of a sacred idol and to a remote lighthouse where the writer witnesses the end of the world.

...and, there's a film adaptation under development. It's produced by a guy named Jonathan Sanger who produced, well nothing special, but a bunch of stuff that actually got made. And he directed an episode of Twin Peaks. And the screenplay is being written by none other than Merritt Johnson, perhaps best known as the.... assistant to Jason Schwartzman on I Heart Huckabees.

Anyway... it could be good?