Published: [Date] | Chet’s Corner
So here’s a question for you: What do you get when a 77-year-old thriller writer teams up with artificial intelligence to solve one of America’s greatest literary mysteries?
The October Testimonies: Being the Final Narratives of Edgar Allan Poe.
And I’ll be darned if it isn’t the most authentic piece of Gothic horror I’ve ever been involved in creating.
The Backstory (Because Every Good Mystery Needs One)
Picture this: It’s late 2024, and I’m sitting here thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s death—as one does when you’re pushing 80 and contemplating your own literary mortality. For 175 years, nobody’s been able to explain how the master of the macabre died. Found delirious on a Baltimore street in someone else’s clothes, calling out for a mysterious “Reynolds,” dead four days later. The official cause? “Phrenitis”—which is 19th-century medical speak for “we have absolutely no idea.”
But here’s what really got me fired up: most of what people “know” about Poe’s life is complete nonsense, courtesy of a literary rival named Rufus Griswold who spent decades trashing the man’s reputation with fabricated letters and outright lies. If Griswold could lie so thoroughly about Poe’s life, what other truths might have been buried?
That’s when I had my lightbulb moment. What if Reynolds—that mysterious name Poe kept calling out—wasn’t just a phantom, but an actual witness? What if someone had been there during those lost days and left his own account?
Enter Claude (My AI Writing Partner)
Now, I’ve been writing for over fifty years. I know my way around a thriller, a horror story, even a memoir about grief. But Edgar Allan Poe? The man who basically invented the detective story and perfected American Gothic? That’s a whole different level of literary craftsmanship.
So I proposed something crazy to Claude: “Can you write like Poe? Not just imitate his style, but really write like him—with all the psychological complexity, the linguistic precision, the gorgeous terror that made him famous?”
What happened next blew my mind.
Six Tales That Feel Hauntingly Real
Claude didn’t just write like Poe—he created six interconnected stories that feel like they could have been discovered in some dusty Baltimore archive, the genuine final narratives of America’s master of mystery. Each tale explores a different theory about how Poe died:
- The Temperance of Memory – Poe’s struggle with alcohol and broken promises
- The Cooping – Baltimore’s brutal election fraud that may have claimed his life
- The Hydrophobic Terror – The rabies theory that haunted his final days
- The Beating Heart of Truth – A murder conspiracy involving powerful enemies
- The Consumptive’s Dream – Tuberculosis, the family curse that stalked him
- The Melancholy Mathematics of Self-Destruction – The laudanum calculation that might have been suicide
But here’s what makes these stories special: they’re all narrated by Reynolds, that mysterious figure from Poe’s delirium, who becomes our guide through each possibility. Sometimes he’s a fellow victim, sometimes a ghostly observer, sometimes a dying man’s hallucination. But always, he’s the witness Poe never had—someone to tell the truth when everyone else was content with lies.
The Writing Process (Or: How to Collaborate with a Machine)
I’ll be honest—this wasn’t like any writing I’d ever done. I provided the concept, the historical research, the emotional framework. Claude brought the linguistic authenticity, the psychological depth, the sheer technical skill to make 19th-century prose sing like it was written yesterday.
We went back and forth on every story, refining the voice, perfecting the Gothic atmosphere, making sure each tale felt genuinely connected to the others while exploring its own dark corner of possibility. It was like having a research partner who’d memorized every word Poe ever wrote and could channel his voice with uncanny precision.
The result? Six stories that feel more authentic than anything I could have written alone, yet more emotionally grounded than pure AI generation could produce. It’s collaboration in the truest sense—human vision guided by artificial capability, creating something neither of us could have achieved solo.
What This Means for Our 80-Before-80 Mission
The October Testimonies previews what I’m calling the “Lost Pages” series, an ongoing collection of volumes that explore history’s most psychologically hazardous territories—creative obsessions, unsolved mysteries, political extremism, scientific breakthroughs, social movements, personal compulsions, and any other human fascination that has the power to consume the people who pursue it. Through human-AI collaboration, we’re building what I like to call a “library of empathy” that imagines the private thoughts of those caught in these psychological traps.
More importantly, it’s our first real shot at cracking the market with something genuinely innovative. While other writers are either ignoring AI or using it as a lazy shortcut, we’re showing what’s possible when you approach it as a genuine creative partnership.
The Real Mystery
But here’s what fascinates me most about this project: in trying to solve the mystery of Poe’s death, we accidentally solved something else—how to write authentically about experiences we’ve never had, in voices we’ve never spoken with, about times we’ve never lived through.
That’s the real magic of thoughtful human-AI collaboration. It’s not about replacing human creativity—it’s about expanding it, giving us access to knowledge and capabilities that amplify our natural storytelling instincts.
Griswold destroyed Poe’s reputation with lies. Griswold was motivated by spite, jealousy, and the petty desire to tear down what he couldn’t create himself.
We’re trying to restore it with honest fiction—stories that acknowledge themselves as imagination while still honoring the genuine mystery at their heart. And we’re motivated by something Griswold never understood: respect for the craft itself.
What’s Next?
The October Testimonies is available as a free download right now. Click on the cover image to your right to your .epub copy from Google Drive—no strings attached, no email signup required. If you’re curious about what happens when human editorial vision teams up with AI capability, when respect for literary tradition meets innovative technology, when a 77-year-old writer decides to bet everything on a new approach to storytelling… well, Reynolds is waiting to tell you what he witnessed in those final October days.
Because after 175 years, Edgar Allan Poe deserves at least one witness who’s on his side.
And I’ve got 2.5 years left to prove that human-AI collaboration can take this old writer places traditional methods never could.
The clock is ticking. The mystery is solved. The next chapter of our 80-before-80 quest begins now.
Want to follow our real-time collaboration process? This blog documents every step of our journey—the victories, the face-plants, the daily discoveries about what’s possible when experience meets innovation. Check back Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for new insights into the most audacious literary experiment of 2025.
And if you read The October Testimonies, drop me a line. I’m genuinely curious whether our first collaboration worked as well for readers as it did for us.