Since the beginning, The Imp of the Perverse has haunted his life and art. Now Edgar Allan Poe, relentlessly shadowed by this destructive force, finds himself on the brink of extinction. Comatose in a Baltimore hospital, he creates the fiction of his own demise, which seeks to reclaim every soul ever quickened by his imagination. "The Raven" compels all inexorably toward implosion, a unified culmination of the creator's mind, an enactment of the cataclysm told in Eureka, Poe's vision of the great cosmic collapse. There is one who resists, the dark and lovely Lenore. With her lover, Danton Reynolds, she finds herself fleeing not only from the shackles of slavery but also from the powerful will of the master, who would have her once again by his side - his darling, his darling, his life and his bride. Unlikely allies aide the desperate fugitives in their flight: C. Auguste Dupin, the famous detective, created as the rational avatar of Poe's own mind, is on a mission to find and save his creator from imminent dissolution and thereby save himself. Through decoding a series of encrypted messages left by Poe to guide and, at the same time, deceive the detective, Dupin has found himself always one step behind the elusive master. Also swept up in this cosmic drama is the distraught and lonely servant, resurrected from the dead, and given the overwhelming task of restoring moral balance to the soul of the great writer. It is these two who convince Lenore and Danton that the only hope for salvation lies in the medium of the lovers' own legend. If they are not to be subsumed as characters in Poe's tale, they must absorb him into theirs. The stage is set for the Armageddon, but it takes the dark, evil, and perverse thing, which has been pursuing all of them since they left Richmond, to force the ultimate showdown. A terrifying finale is played out in the maelstrom of Poe's imagination; from it can emerge only one survivor in this, the last narrative of Edgar Allan Poe.