The Fall of the House of Usher

Summoned to the crumbling mansion of his boyhood friend Roderick Usher, the narrator finds him wasting away amid morbid dread and the mysterious illness of his sister Madeline—until a night of storm brings the house’s horrors to their shattering climax. Poe’s most famous tale is a perfect distillation of Gothic terror, its decaying house a mirror of a disintegrating mind. Steeped in atmosphere, dread, and the collapse of body, mind, and dwelling alike, The Fall of the House of Usher is a masterpiece of horror and one of the greatest short stories ever written. Hypnotic and terrifying, it remains the essential Poe tale of madness and doom.