Status Updates From The Fall of the House of Usher

Murders of the Rue Morgue was very interesting, it got a little tiresome reading several pages of Dupin’s reasoning especially since so much of it is doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As one of the first fictional detectives this has a lot of what would become staples of the genre and though I have my complaints I definitely had fun reading this one.

The Murders of the Rue Morgue had a rocky start, but once the characters get introduced into the story things start to make sense. C. Auguste Dupin is very interesting, at least in the few pages I’ve read of him, as the first known literary detective I’m excited to see more of him after his wild deduction in the first pages of the story.

Spectacles is a lot of fun to read. Definitely not a horror story, well not in the traditional sense though I’m sure the main character was horrified in the end, but really taps into the sense of humor that Poe has. It’s just a funny story through to the end, and the problems of the other three stories I’ve read so far don’t much apply to this one.

So far, Spectacles has been my favorite of the stories. Poe’s writing in this case has both the verbosity of the first three works in this collection, and the humor present in at least ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’, but in this case the language goes a long way in emphasizing the obsession the narrator has with madame Lalande.

Landor’s Cottage is just descriptions of approaching and witnessing the wilderness surrounding a cabin, and then the cabin itself. I didn’t really have fun reading this one, but his use of language is intriguing even if I do think it detracts from the horror stories, in some ways it makes this story fell like an exercise in vocabulary for Poe.

2/22/25
Having finished ‘the Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘Never bet the Devil Your Head’ I see the macabre sense of humor that Mike Flanagan talks about a bit in his introduction to this collection. The language is, at times, difficult to understand which is something quite common with writings of this age, and isn’t a fault of Poe. His verbosity almost takes away from the horror at times though.