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The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan PoeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The second piece i read after Nevermore by Edgar Allan Poe.
This is a case of Flowers in the Attic gone horribly wrong.
A gothic horror story, an unidentified narrator tells us his experience about meeting a long lost friend when he was a kid.. requesting him to visit his house, called House of Usher. Even if he hasn't heard from this friend for a long time, he decides to accept the request and when he arrives, the house itself is dark, creepy, crumbling at the edges and has a quiet desperation of a mad man.
I, in my personal life, has encountered such a house. Although it is an abandoned estate, the windows dark and yawning, the gargoyles situated in all four corners sit idling, their wicked smiles inviting to passers by who might happen to look up. And the house itself, massive and has this quiet but pulsing magnetism to it.... it felt alive. As if it is full of energy, as if the house itself is HEAVING. I thought of this house when i read this book.
Okay, back to the story, the man then notices (quite for the first time) that his friend, Roderick Usher, has a sister, a fleeting creature he's only seen once passing by the an area of the house. Each of the siblings have an illness. Roderick is a chronic malingerer (someone who proposes and believes he is ill but is actually healthy; a hypochondriac) and Madeleine the sister has a unique illness, "a cataleptical character", slow wasting away of a person.
One day, the lady Madeleine dies and Roderick requests his friend to help 'entomb' his sister in a dungeon (which is actually beneath the narrator's own sleeping portion of the house. The narrator helps Roderick entomb his sister and he then notices his friend beginning to worsen with his illness.
So, for the sake of not going into spoilers, more troubling things ensue after this activity.
dear god this book is awesome!
I really enjoyed this short story which made me realize why Edgar Allan Poe is hailed as the BEST AUTHOR OF GOTHIC STORIES and POEMS.
Man, it's so good!
So many underlying questions about the narrator and Roderick and his twin sister. The narrator mentioned that he knew this man well when they were kids but then he had no idea that Roderick had a twin sister. Was Madeline kept just indoors when they were kids? possibly because of her illness?
Also, the question of Ushers having no more direct descendants. In the book, it follows "I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain"
This obviously suggests that the family are inbred, that both siblings may be kids of parents who were actual cousins or siblings themselves. Gah, the psychological thrill this book displayed blows my mind!
And finally, the own narrator's consent of 'burying' the sister, even if only for just the meantime. It felt like the narrator himself has absorbed all the malignant qualities of the house and has lost his faculties to determine what is normal and not.
I mean at the death of a sibling, should there be a report? some form of attending to the proper burial rites? a wake? Why did the narrator agree to just bury the sister, even noting the slight 'blush' in the cheeks, i think he must know subconsciously that something has gone terribly wrong but he couldn't stop anyway.
Lastly, i really love how at the end of every gothic horror stories, readers can openly discuss what they think about the stories because it has so many facets to it. Clues in the words being used by the author, or the actual thoughts of a protagonist or even sometimes the way a character is described by another enlightens us to the psyche of the human mind and how twisted it could be if only given opportunity.
Brrrr!
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