Few American writers have had as penetrating and enduring an influence on world literature as Edgar Allan Poe. Celebrated as the father of the modern detective story, he is also the presiding genius of the macabre. His “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,” first published in 1840, inspired writers as disparate as Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Kafka. Poe has a recognizable signature; even when his influence is surreptitious – we detect it in Nabokov and Faulkner, among many others – we sense it in a certain unmistakable tone. This tone combines the gruesome and the baroque with a faint suggestion of barely sup pressed humor, a sort of muffled hilarity in the midst of horror.

Poe, a formidable literary critic in his own right, noted this unsettling melange when he remarked that certain of his ghastliest tales bordered on farce and that but a single twist in style separated the comic from the catastrophic. This is immediately evident in such tales as “Berenice,” in which the plot turns on the removal of all 32 of the beloved’s exquisite white teeth while she lies in a catatonic stupor. The story as written appalls, but the original conception, Poe tell us, was comedic. Humor and horror are kissing cousins. Both depend upon a strategy of artful exaggeration.

Of Poe’s innumerable progeny the oddest may have been the Iranian novelist Sadegh Hedayat. In his work we catch the authentic Poe frisson bizarrely transmuted. Storytelling has a way of insinuating itself past all boundary lines; it ignores political deadlocks and diplomatic culs de sac.A good case could be made that storytelling as we know it began in ancient Iran, with strong impetus from India, in the animal fables of the Pancatantra. And though “The Thousand and One Nights” is set in medieval Mamluk Egypt, Shahrazad, who weaves the tales, is herself Persian.

As a small example of this continuous cultural osmosis between Persia and the West, take our common word “pajama.” The word is originally Persian “pay-jYmah” and came into English via Urdu; it fell out of use in Iran, only returning later to Farsi (itself an Indo-European language) through the medium of English,as “pizhYma.”Stories,like the words that form them, are secret globetrotters with a taste for disguise.

Hedayat was born in Tehran in 1903. During his brief, intense life he regenerated modern Iranian fiction, drawing on folklore, mythology, and ancient Zoroastrian religious traditions. Influenced deeply by de Maupassant and Kafka (whom he translated into Farsi), as well as by Poe, Hedayat cultivated a spare but lyrical prose to nightmarish effect. His masterpiece is “The Blind Owl” (Grove Press, 130 pages, $13.), which first appeared in English in 1957, translated by D.P. Costello, who worked not from the Farsi, but from an earlier French translation.

An owl sees in the dark; a blind owl is therefore enwrapped in double darkness. The story is told in a monologue by an unnamed narrator. As it progresses we realize that the blindness in question is multifoliate (to use a word dear to Poe). Though the narrator is sighted, he cannot distinguish between dream, waking, the delirium caused by fever, or the terrifying visions induced by opium, all of which interlace in his account. He claims to write for his “shadow on the wall,” but is himself a shadow addressing deeper shadows, and the darkness his eye cannot pierce is as deep as the world itself.

I first read “The Blind Owl” more than 30 years ago and found it unforgettable; certain of its images have remained with me ever since. In rereading it after so long, I was curious as to whether it would hold up. What first intrigued me in the book – the vivid hallucinations, the exotic imagery, the tone of anguish – now strike me as rather melodramatic. I still consider it a small masterpiece but for another reason.

The narrator pursues the antiquated art of painting pen-cases, all of which depict the same scene: a cypress tree beneath which a “bent old man” hunches while a radiant young girl clad in black offers him a single morning glory. Anyone who has seen an oriental case for old-fashioned reed-pens – highly lacquered, sprinkled with glittering gold dust and imparting a cedary aroma when slid open – will recognize the sort of painting in question, at once rarefied and kitschy. This image animates the book, undergoing continual transformation, while the old man and the lovely girl themselves as sume successive guises, as alluring as they are shocking.

Such a book could be a self-indulgent mess,the mere ravings of a fever dream. Instead, the tale unfolds with the rigor of a fugue. Hedayat uses his motifs in contrapuntal fashion. Images are his chords, and he deploys them cunningly, at times as refrains, at others as variations. These images are often despairing, as when the narrator remarks:

I had become like the flies which crowd indoors at the beginning of the autumn, thin, half-dead flies which are afraid at first of the buzzing of their own wings and cling to some one point of the wall until they realize that they are alive; then they fling themselves recklessly against door and walls until they fall dead around the floor.

In its symphonic gruesomeness “The Blind Owl” stands as a sort of tacit tribute to Poe. Its narrator might have stepped straight out of “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart.” As in Poe, obsession governs, but to a far greater degree than in Poe, Hedayat uses the repetitive nature of obsession to orchestrate a complex sequence of riffs. Mania has never been made more twitchingly melodic.

Though “The Blind Owl” is a very noir concoction of murder, necrophilia, paranoia, and drug-induced dementia – in short, all the stage props of the genre – the beauty of its prose and the precision of its composition lift it to another plane.There are even grim bursts of hilarity throughout. Beneath the trappings, however, the despair was real enough. In 1951 Hedayat flew to Paris, where he committed suicide. At the end not even his fastidious music could bridge the abyss he had peeped into, both within his homeland and within himself.

eormsby@nysun.com