The Fall of the House of Usher

Summoned by a letter from a childhood friend he has not seen in years, an unnamed narrator arrives at the bleak, crumbling mansion of the ancient Usher family. He finds Roderick Usher wasted by a nameless nervous malady and Roderick's twin sister, Lady Madeline, fading toward death from a strange cataleptic illness.

As the narrator tries to lift his friend's spirits, an atmosphere of dread settles over the house — a dread bound up with the fissured walls of the mansion itself, which seem to breathe with the family's decay. When Madeline dies and is entombed in the vaults below, the last night of the House of Usher begins.

Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 tale is a cornerstone of Gothic literature: a claustrophobic study of madness, isolation, and inherited doom in which house and family are one, sinking together into ruin.