The Fall of the House of Usher
Ratings82
Average rating4
15
Ratings82
Average rating4
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a narrative short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine before being included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story is a work of detective fiction and includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
Reviews with the most likes.
Kevin Sorbo is doing audio books now? ? yes! I hope he does more because it was good. It's a project by Macabre mansion to bring back old radio readings of audiobooks. loved it!
This was a perfect short re-read for Halloween this year! Fall of the House of Usher was my first Poe story and one of my very first few brushes with horror as a child, and certainly one of the most vivid. I remember it so well that I've only wanted to re-read it just a couple of times since to refresh my memory on it.
The prose in here was more challenging than I recall. I'm no stranger to 19th century works, but Poe's writing, in this story in particular, is more purple-prosey than I expected. I'm glad that I had read an abridged, simplified version as a child (with illustrations too), otherwise I'd never have understood a thing about it. Even now, I found myself having to re-read sentences and whole paragraphs to really get what was going on. In that sense, it reminded me quite a bit of the writing style of Jane Eyre, which checks out given that both are such mainstays of Gothic literature.
There's also a lot more symbolism and imagery here that I never fully appreciated, but I won't delve into it here for fear of sounding pretentious.
This is deservedly a classic in horror and gothic lit, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in those genres.
40 some pages to tell me a story I could have summed up in 3-4 pages.
Maybe this was horrifying 200 year ago, but now it was just tedious
