Quoth Eliot in Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (p 87):
I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming.
Very apt. Now consider for a moment the reaction in much high culture to Death's inevitability. Take, for example, Maugham's light touch upon his re-telling of "Appointment in Samarra". Puts into piebald terms Poe as an uncultured hack.
I finished WifW yesterday (UK cover above. Mine was the much less striking US ed). I loved Icarus Girl, but in her latter two, Oyeyemi's style of approaching you with her story, then pulling coyly away, is infuriating. But while with The Opposite House I felt put upon for the whole book, in WifW I didn't succumb to irritated restlessness until near the end. The problem with her approach is that it interferes with good old-fashioned pity and terror; probably just my not having caught up to modernity in the sort of satisfaction I crave from a novel. There is something about Oyeyemi, though, that compensates for my unslaked dramatic thirst. I know exactly what it is. It's her language.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nnnedi Okorafor tell stories that leave me fat, full and grateful (I'm now two stories into The Thing Around Your Neck). I look hungrily for pretty much anything they write. My overall regard for Oyeyemi might be cooler, but boy does she ever make me write. As I read her, words spin in my head and expand into ideas, blue-shifting into my own ideas, from which I distill my own words. My usual bookmark for an Oyeyemi book is a sheet of paper with a poem or set of apothegms for which she provided instant inspiration. I do enjoy her more as a poet than as a novelist, which suits me just fine.
And really, considering my appreciation for subtlety as revealed in my attitude towards Poe, I heartily recommend WifW (as well as The Icarus Girl) for the sort of writing that reveals true terrors without deafening you with artless shrieking.