Behind the Curtain

"Behind the Curtain" is short, also simple, a tale of revenge in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe. The author even mentions Poe in her story, and her two characters, Santallos, the narrator, and Quentin, his guest, drink Amontillado. Santallos is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, including mummies and mummy cases. You might say he's wrapped up in his hobby, so much so that he neglects his wife. Naturally, she falls into the arms of the younger man, Quentin. Santallos concocts a fiendish kind of revenge. Poe might have twisted the story one way. Francis Stevens chose to twist it another. A more conventional author would have left it untwisted. There is, I think, a feminine sensibility in the twist, despite the fact that the narrator is a man and the story was written by a woman who signed her stories with a masculine pseudonym.

Public Domain (P)2022 Mike Vendetti