How does someone fall in love with a particular kind of writing or an author who has long since departed from this life? What draws us to find in words the echoes of our own fears or longings? For those of us lucky enough to have a literary passion, the story of how we met our first love is probably just like tales of other first meetings—funny or quirky, full of accidents and coincidences. My literary passion is Edgar Allan Poe, and I met him—in print—when I was fourteen years old.

It was just after a huge storm that had featured an alarmingly beautiful display of lightning and wind. The power had been knocked out, and I was sitting at a window, watching the wet night grow darker. I had been living with my grandmother for a few weeks while my parents “figured things out.” I loved my grandmother, but I couldn’t shake the sadness and anxiety I was feeling. The storm had been a welcome diversion. As the clouds cleared, a fog rose and filtered the moonlight, casting a bluish hue over the yard. The scene was moody and solemn, but beautiful. My grandmother broke my reverie by bustling into the room, carrying two lit candles and a book. “It’ll take hours for the electric company to get all the way out here to fix the power,” she said. Why don’t you read? I’ll go find some batteries for the flashlights. ”

She set the book and a candle on the floor, and rushed out as though she had to catch the batteries before they fled. I picked up the book she had left on the floor. It was a collection of old stories—just a paperback and not much to look at. I turned to one by Poe—“The Cask of Amontillado.” Set during the carnival season in an unnamed European city, the story features an unhinged narrator named Montresor who plots revenge on an acquaintance. I liked the gruesome setting of a mysterious burial vault. In Poe’s descriptions, I could practically smell the dust and mold. And I was stunned by the horrible ending. But what struck me most was how Montresor spoke directly to the reader—to me. He expected my sympathy as he brought his terrible revenge. Up to that point, all the stories I had ever read had set the criminal or lunatic at a distance. They didn’t draw me into a mind that was a truly scary place to be. This one did.

I finished Poe’s story and turned to another. My grandmother came back with a flashlight, and I kept reading. There were more stories by Poe and others by authors whom I had never heard of but who came to feel like friends—Amelia B. Edwards, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe. I later learned that these stories were part of the Gothic tradition, but I didn’t care about that. I fell into them and was carried away, like someone swimming in a river. In all of them, the characters were driven by intense emotions of love, hate, or jealousy. Some featured ghosts or monsters, but others featured regular people whose sorrows made them ghostly or monstrous. They were tales full of darkness and light, just like the storm I had enjoyed with its thunder and lightning. They were stories that made all that I felt and feared seem less of a burden.

That evening spent in darkness, both real and imaginary, never left me. The stories helped me understand that life is not easy and people are complex—simultaneously strong and weak, wonderful and terrible. Though I could not articulate it then, I can now: The stories helped me see that life can be a mansion full of secrets and dark passages, but also of beauty and light. They helped me choose to embrace it all. After another week at my grandmother’s, I went home, armed with stories to see me through whatever might come.