“Every boy has his first book; I mean to say, one book among all others which in early youth first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me this first book was the âSketch-Book' of Washington Irving . . . Whenever I open the pages of the âSketch-Book,' I open also that mysterious door which leads back into the haunted chambers of youth.”
âHenry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1859

W
ashington Irving was a New York writer, but what Longfellow glimpsed through that mysterious door of Irving's prose was the haunted chambers of a youth Longfellow had spent in Maine.

Of course, no Mainer looks only back toward the past. As much as we cherish our heritage and traditions, our state motto is, after all,
Dirigo
(“I Lead”). Take the case of Frank Andrew Munsey (1854â1925). Born in Mercer, he became a frustrated telegraph office manager in Augusta who wanted “the future . . . and with it the big world.” After considering railroads, steel, and banking, Munsey forged his future in publishing.

He emigrated from Augusta to New York City in 1882 with his editorial ideas in tow. Persevering through a series of financial crises, Munsey founded a weekly paper that evolved into a monthly called
The Argosy
. Starting in 1896, he printed it in magazine format on inexpensive wood-pulp paper: through Yankee frugality, Munsey invented the pulp magazine.

Periodicals had been publishing science fiction, fantasy, and horror since long before Munsey arrived on the scene, but the real flowering of genre short fiction occurred within the pulps of the twentieth century. Although not “science fiction magazines” as such,
The Argosy
and Munsey's other periodicals did present readers with all manner of speculative fiction. Perhaps most famously, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan was born in Munsey's
All-Story
. Rival publications followed Munsey's lead into the pulp fiction market. Names of magazines and authors still well-known today debuted in the ensuing decades:
Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
; Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and others. Science fiction's Golden Age and its giants emerged from the foundation of Munsey's economizing innovation.

These authors owed a sort of second-hand debt to yet another Mainer, novelist and critic John Neal (1793â1876). In 1829, Neal praised a book entitled
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems
. The young poet called Neal's review “the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard.” And so it was thanks to the Portland native that Edgar Allan Poe gained footing for his successâand the genre gained one of its most important founding fathers.

Although Neal himself is largely forgotten, his literary theory laid the groundwork for authors from Longfellow to Mark Twain and countless others besides. Neal's own novels and short fiction cannot be called fantasy, but they were highly Gothic and he clearly appreciated Poe's fantastical imagination. Neal advocated the use of Americanâespecially New Englandâcharacters and settings to form the basis of a genuinely American literary tradition.

So Neal might have approved of the twenty-one speculative fiction writers assembled here, each one inspired by Maine and its people. (And Munsey might have published them, too, given the chance.) Both two-time Maine governor Edward Kent and the incomparable Missouri writer Mark Twain give us nineteenth-century views of future Maines, while Elizabeth Hand's Nebula Award-winning story and Daniel Hatch's tale afford us post-9/11 glimpses of days to come. Edgar Pangborn, whose first fiction appeared during the Golden Age, leads us deep into the primeval Maine forest. Maine's towering contribution to modern fiction, Stephen King, drives us down nearly forgotten (but unforgettable) backwoods roads. In Gardner Dozois's strange Skowhegan, Jack Chalker's interdimensional maritime ferry crossings, and other writers' lakes, woods, and towns, the reader will encounter just a few of Maine's many haunted chambers.

But first an accountâa true accountâby Henry David Thoreau will carry us over the threshold of that mysterious door:

II
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Two Excerpts from “Ktaadn”

by Henry David Thoreau

Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. It was visited by Professor J. W. Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the State Geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from Boston in 1845. All these have given accounts of their expeditions. Since I was there, two or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their stories. Besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.

Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable
Nature
, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over “Burnt Lands,” burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and dread and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever,âto be the dwelling of man, we say,âso Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,ânot his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,âno, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,âthe home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,âto be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.

We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where
our
wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,â
that
my body might,âbut I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!âThink of our life in nature,âdaily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, â rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The
solid
earth! the
actual
world! the
common sense! Contact! Contact! Who
are we?
where
are we?

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