Dudley Potter [the protagonist of The Name of Annabel Lee] is a bit of a nerd…. Dudley's soul lies dormant until a traveling avant-garde theater group involves him in audience participation, and he meets the blond and beautiful actress Annabel Lee. (Her mother had a thing for Poe.) But after a few months of passion, Annabel splits, leaving only a note; "End of the affair. Sorry I have to go." Has she really ceased to care? Dudley must know and goes in hot pursuit, without even a sabbatical…. Back in our own SoHo at "the House of Usher" (a sadomasochistic sex show with Annabel Lee as dominatrix), Dudley, who has shown no sign of deductive capacity so far, suddenly puts it all together. This reader stared in disbelief at the last page, thinking, "Only this and nothing more?" Julian Symons, a past master of the genre, can do better than this. The only things that seem to have caught his interest are his vivid and Juvenalian locations and background characters. Unfortunately, his social satire overshadows the perfunctory plot and zero of a hero, and all his Poe-tic references are not enough to make for suspense.
Meredith Tax, in a review of "The Name of Annabel Lee," in The New York Times Book Review, January 29, 1984, p. 22.
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