Reading 1001 discussion

Read 2010

Considered the best of Poe's short stories. A tale told by an unnamed narrator of his boyhood friend Roderick Usher. The narrator has been asked to come visit him. Roderick describes himself as ill. He has a mental illness. The Fall of the House of Usher is both about the house and the family.

Oh, how I hope my solitary semi-confinement in these Covid-times won't lead to such a hefty mental breakdown.

This is a haunted house story indeed! Glad I could read it in a sunny garden, if read on a stormy night... Who knows what would happen!

The main character in this story gets a summons from a dying friend to visit him. As he is Roderick’s most intimate boyhood friend, the narrator comes at once. However, as the narrator apparently does not know much at all about his best friend—like the basic fact that Roderick has a twin sister? What is real and what is imagined here?

It's amazing how such a short story can capture you and leave you behind in nervous confusion.

The Fall of the House of Usher is a short gothic story by Edgar Allan Poe. It speaks of Roderick Usher, the last descendant of the Usher family. Everything in the story serves to show the decline of the family and old mansion of the Ushers: they are old, decayed and gloomy. Roderick Usher is mentally disturbed, sensitive, much older and in poor health than his age – he is the symbol of the ancient aristocratic families who are in decline, and sometimes destroy themselves even from within. Whole setting of the story is dark, scary and provides perfect atmosphere. Overall, perfect reading for one (short) afternoon.
My rating: 4 stars.

Another of Poe's short stories in which he superbly draws an old aristocratic family that is about to end due to mental incapacity. The narrator sees and feels the depressing gloom that wraps itself around the very house that the old family lives in. Roderick and Madeline are the last of their line and the stones of the house echo their ruin. Here Poe describes crippling nervous anxiety, madness, fear of madness, fear of contagion, and investigates the concept of living a life that is barely a life, all the while having the sane narrator feel the surrounding diseases as something that may overtake him if he does not leave in time. One of the first of the gothic horror stories of that era.

I just don’t enjoy Gothic. The narrator visits the spooky home of an old friend where the atmosphere is thick with foreboding - apparently. It just isn’t convincing enough to hold my interest and ghostly noises terrifying one to death is overwrought.

The Fall of the House of Usher is a short haunted house tales which embodies an old-fashioned gothic horror. The house of the Ushers which the narrator visited, with its large crack in its walls with the crumbling at the edges, and its decrepitude and instability, is mirrored in the persons of Roderick Usher, and his twin sister.

The Fall of the House of Usher from Edgar Allan Poe
4/5 stars

I listened to the audiobook of this short story, it was a mere 52 minutes. It was first published January 1, 1839. Edgar Allan Poe is widely regarded as the short story master of horror fiction. I am well aware of his famous poem The Raven but not his other work. This is the story of the Usher family, all that is left is a brother and sister. Hidden secrets abound in this creaky old house. I followed up this story with the movie starring Vincent Price which was great. I look forward to listening to his remaining books on the list.