In the decades that followed, opinion began to shift. Jules Verne, conventionally considered the father of science fiction, liked it so much that he published a sequel in 1897, titled Antarctic Mystery. Poe’s book has also been said to prefigure Moby Dick, and has inspired authors from Henry James to Arthur Conan Doyle. Baudelaire translated it, and the great Argentinian short-story writer, Jorge Luis Borges, declared it to be quite simply Poe’s greatest work. And Yann Martel, let’s not forget, ingeniously named Life of Pi’s tiger Richard Parker.

Striking synchronicity

So what of that macabre parallel between fact and fiction? Well, it went seemingly unnoticed until a descendent of the real-life Richard Parker brought it to light. Nigel Parker wrote about the striking similarities between Poe’s work and the subsequent fate of his forebear – about how Parker was one of four shipwrecked survivors, who ate a turtle before resorting to cannibalism – with Parker the victim. Nigel Parker relayed all this in a letter to author and parapsychology buff Arthur Koestler, who had requested from the public tales of “striking coincidence”. Koestler was so taken with the synchronicity that he published the letter in The Sunday Times in 1974.

It’s an eerie footnote that feeds into an aura of all-round strangeness pervading Poe’s short life and enduring legacy, that casts him as an archetypal tortured artist brushed by otherworldly traits. The episode sits alongside the mystery of his untimely death, at 40, just four days after he’d turned up delirious on the streets of Baltimore, dressed in someone else’s clothes. The idea that he could peer into the future somehow compliments his enthusiasm and flair for cryptography or code-making, which he incorporated into his 1840 story The Gold-Bug, and seems peculiarly of a piece with his long list of phobias, including insanity and the fear of being buried alive. He was, to quote JW Ocker’s award-winning literary travelogue, Poe-Land, “an angel of the odd”.