Extract

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens...

A house stands at the edge of a dark tarn, a barely perceptible fissure running from its roof to the waterline, and everything within it is dying: the family, the heir, the sister who has been buried alive in the vault below. Poe published this story in 1839 and achieved something that has haunted the Western imagination ever since, a tale in which setting, character, and atmosphere are so fused that the house itself becomes a nervous system. Roderick Usher is an artist whose senses have grown unbearably acute, a man consumed by the very refinement that defines him. When the sister rises from her premature tomb, the house splits along its ancient crack and sinks into the tarn. Dissolution is the only unity this family will ever know.