The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings

"Poe is so central to my idea of the Gothic. Especially The Fall of the House of Usher is such a huge inspiration for this particular group of books that I’ve been writing. It’s about an unnamed narrator who is visiting a friend, Roderick Usher, and Roderick is in a bit of a pickle. He has a sister who is very ill, and he’s stuck in this forlorn house out in the English countryside, and it’s literally falling apart around him. This is very much a story in which the psychology of the character is manifested in the house itself. In fact, when the narrator first arrives at the doorstep, he makes a remark that there is a fine fissure starting at the base of the house, running up the side of it – which tells you where this is going to go right away. Usher is full of the beautiful, baroque language I associate with the Gothic. As with Gothic architecture, the beauty of its expression is part of the point. It’s full of strangeness and weird poetry. It features Edgar Allen Poe’s notorious fascination with the eroticism of death, something I’ve never seen any other writer treat with the same feverish intensity, the same potency as Poe does. In a call-back – or call-forward – to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House , the narrative posits that the house itself may be alive, a malignant thing that wills Roderick Usher’s doom. It all leads to this hideous revelation – hideous and beautiful and shocking, even to this day. I love it so much. His short stories are fantastic. He wrote a vast amount of material that isn’t Gothic horror, but it’s mostly the Gothic horror that lives on to this day. “Ligeia” is a great one. This is about a man who is in love with the titular character. She’s into spooky, forbidden stuff; she talks to him about weird texts and the forbidden knowledge that obsess her. He’s utterly smitten. Then she falls ill, as so many women do in Poe’s stories do, and passes away. [Spoiler alert] Later, this narrator marries another woman. He doesn’t love her like he loved Ligeia, but nevertheless they are married. And then she too becomes ill – these are spoilers, but the plot’s conclusion is not what the story is about , the story is about the experience – and as she is dying, she fades, she starts to come back a little bit, and then she fades further, and each time she fades her brief revival is more powerful, more stark. And she’s starting to look more like Ligeia. At the end of the story, she dies — but then, emerging from her bedroom fully resurrected, is Ligeia herself, in her resplendent, deathly glory. What does all this mean? Is it real? Is it a delusion brought about by his own madness? Did Ligeia’s occult knowledge afford her a way back? Poe doesn’t tell us. This is the dream logic at work. The story is eerie and strange and sad and beautiful. Another one is the very famous “The Cask of Amontillado,” about a man who’s getting walled up by someone he’d thought was his friend. I won’t say any more about that, because it really should be read. It’s a short, brutal delight. Finally, there is “The Tell-Tale Heart,” another classic, and the first Poe story I ever read, as it was included in an anthology of horror stories I came across as a kid. Again, we have the return of the repressed. It’s about a guy who has to look upon the leering face – and in particular the huge, vulture-like eye – of a man he’s forced to live with. He grows to hate him for this terrifying eye, murders him, and hides him under the floorboards. Later, the police come to his house, and in his paranoia, the narrator starts to hear the dead man’s beating heart under the floorboards. I won’t go on too much more beyond that, but again, just a magnificent story. For me, Poe is as good as it gets."