10 - The Fall of the House of Usher

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
Book Sales, 2004
842 pages (14)
Date completed: November 7, 2009


I won't write too much about this, because technically it's a short story. But the 1001 books to read before you die list counts it as a book, and so do I! haha.

This is one of the less creepy Poe stories I've read. The narrator seems pretty reliable, too, compared to other Poe narrators. It was packed with the usual creepy elements-- the house with windows that looked like vacant eyes, the stormy nights, the tortured souls within, and of course the fact that the Usher woman is buried alive and then comes out of the crypt to die on top of her brother.

So yeah. Creepy. The house is alive, the brother and sister are incestuous (as depicted by the way they die), and the title is both literal and figurative. There is a very quick sketch of what I got out of it.