The Fall of the House of Usher

The most terrifying house in American literature. Poe doesn't just set a story in the Usher mansion : he makes the house a living presence, its stones breathing with decay, its corridors exhaling centuries of accumulated madness. An unnamed narrator arrives at the request of his childhood friend Roderick Usher, only to find both man and mansion in terminal decline. Roderick's twin sister Madeline is dying. The narrator watches as the boundaries between Roderick's crumbling mind and the crumbling mansion begin to blur : until neither he nor we can say which is causing which. The final pages, with Madeline rising from her coffin and the house itself splitting apart, are among the most devastating in horror fiction. This is not a story about ghosts. It's about what happens when the weight of family, of blood, of a place becomes too heavy for sanity to bear.