For the sake of messing up my dreams and night fright, I decided to not only read this story when I was alone, I also decided to watch the movies. Both of them, all of them.
It started off well, I have read this story before during my first year in university and I remember it being one of my favourites because of the eerie feeling it gives and the whole gothic element is so perfectly captured by Poe that I thought to myself, why don't I read this? I have a paper coming up in my book-review class where we've been given a few horror gothic stories we can choose to read and review, and this one is one of them so I thought, it can't possibly be as creepy as I thought it was before, right? Right. I was wrong, this story is absolutely still as creepy and eerie as before.
So, because natural selection is a thing and I'm walking straight into the light over here, I decided what better time to sit down and read this is there, if I don't read it while wearing headphones, home alone on a rainy thursday morning?
I didn't have time to finish it during my home-alone time so I decided that I was going to finish it during the rest of the week and divide my fright in equal numbers, one heart ache a day. Which leads us to sunday, when I had some more time, I sat down, in the dark because the sun sets at 4pm, I shut myself into my game room and decided that now was the time to speed-up my aging process.
About three jumps later because a shampoo bottle fell in the bathroom across the hall, I thought the leaf that fell off the roof and passed my window was something else and the corner of my eye convinced me the man walking across the street was somehow taking an escalator to the second floor of my house to kill me, I finished the story, tied a tight ponytail to hold back my new found wrinkles and wrote this review.
Anyway, the book!
In The Fall of the House of Usher, a man comes to the large estate belonging to the Usher family. He has received a message from his childhood friend Roderick Usher. Roderick Usher is ill, but he seems to be mentally ill, tormented by what he thinks will happen rather than by a concrete illness. Both Roderick Usher himself and the house he lives in are haunted by something unspeakable and unpleasant, something that seems to be sitting in the walls themselves.
The Fall of the House of Usher is most definitely a pure and simple classic horror tale, that relies on the standard gothic elements of big tall houses, cold weather, darkness, tombs, storms and mental illness. It checks off every classic gothic point on the list, so much that you can recognize the patterns from other stories in it. However, Poe's choice of language is still very alluring - albeit a haughty but thats just the Poe element.
The Fall of the House of Usher is a story to really let yourself sink into, just take in the magnificent gothic classic short story that not only provides you with a great read, but also that short story, leaves-you-wanting-more, eerieness that you expect from a ghost story, and it's a very short story but it provides rich language and structure.
The short story is undeniably impressive; everything is well connected and Poe does a good job in pulling together all those loose ends by the final part of the novel. Every detail and aspect of the story is used to complement something else, nothing is left un-managed. Just as the house is a reflection of its inhabitants, all surroundings are dominant in that they evoke emotions, in this case an oppressive feeling of fear, doom and darkness. In other words, it's gothic literature so it's splashing about.
The Fall of the House of Usher wouldn't be called an easy-going short story, either in terms of language or content, but because of its short length, it is easy to read. The story is such an important part of Poe's writing and is one of his most important short stories.
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