The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales (Signet Classics) (edition 1998)

by Edgar Allan Poe

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I just wanted to give this a shot because it is a classic fall read. I enjoyed it. I thought it was interesting. I understand why people like it and Poe's work. (

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mythical_library | Sep 27, 2024 |

Un cuento clásico con una enorme influencia desde su creación y una construcción prodigiosa de la atmósfera. Me sigue pareciendo magnífico por muchas veces que lo lea. Buena edición con excelentes ilustraciones. (

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Alberto_MdH | Sep 11, 2024 |

I'm a big EAP fan, but realized I hadn't read the title story yet! So that's why I picked this up! And what better time of the year to read Poe? This collection is dang good, but I didn't give it 5 stars because two of the stories were kind of lame, and very un-Poe like. Neither "The Balloon Hoax" nor "Diddling" seemed to belong in this book, as neither were creepy or thrilling. They should either not have been included, or two different stories that matched the theme of the rest of the collection should have been substituted. But apart from that, I was very satisfied with the read! (

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Stahl-Ricco | Oct 17, 2023 |

Kind of a hit or miss collection. There were a few stories that I found really dull to read, but I really enjoyed the title story, "The Fall of the House of Usher", along with "The Black Cat", and all the classic Poe tales, "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Masque of the Red Death", etc. Poe is a master at delving into the dark psychological recesses of the human mind.

I also really liked the Dupin tales, which reminded me a lot of Sherlock Holmes-- makes sense since apparently Poe's Dupin provided the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic detective. "Diddling" was also an interesting find, it's more of an exposition than a story but I enjoyed all the descriptions of the various cons.

Poe's only full-length novel, "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym", was a real disappointment. An adventure story and travelogue, it didn't have as much excitement as I was expecting despite having a couple sea voyages with humans braving against the forces of nature, a mutiny, cannabalism, a mysterious island and an encounter with an unknown culture. Naturally, Poe does a great job describing the despair of being lost at sea, sick and starving, and all the mental distresses of the main character in bleak times. The emotions and agonies are felt so viscerally in his writing. Much of the story, though, is bogged down by dry descriptions of the technical aspects of sea voyages, and I found myself skimming through those to get to more interesting parts. (

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serru | Oct 6, 2022 |

This compilation of short stories include some of Poe's most famous works. They include adventures, including one short story, "A Descent into the Maelstrom", and one novella, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", which involve man against the transitory and chaotic nature of the sea. I would imagine that the sea for 19th century sailors and travelers could be a source of horror. The others involve horrible situations that characters find themselves, included bound on a table with a bladed pendulum, slowly descending, swinging back and forth "The Pit and the Pendulum", or being walled alive within brick masonry, "The Cask of Amontillado." My favorite in this grouping was "The Black Cat" about a guilt-ridden man is haunted by a black cat who he victimized and leads a murderous conclusion. Several of these stories were translated into horror films I loved at Saturday matinees as a boy. (

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John_Warner | Oct 24, 2020 |

I've read two stories from this collection for the 1001 books to read before you die list. The first one "The Purloined Letter" sucked. I DNF because it was so boring and really too much information to get through just to find out how he got his hands on the letter. However, the second story "The Fall of the House of Usher" was more of the Poe writing that I enjoy. It's about a haunted house with a poor man who is going crazy inside it. Ending was strange and left it to the reader's imagination what happened to Usher. (

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booklover3258 | May 1, 2018 |

I'd never read Poe before when I bought this book. I usually hate florid writing (basically, anything before the late 19th century) and a quick glance at the prose made me a little worried about whether I would even be able to make sense of it. However, I persevered and now I've finished all the stories and am sad cause I know there's no more to read.

Poe understands horror and suspense to perfection. He also understands a lot of other things which nobody seems to appreciate anymore, IMO.

Some of the more surreal stories in this collection reminded me strongly of Gogol. I'm not really a fan of surreal writing, but many of the other stories - especially the 'futuristic technology' ones - reminded me of some of Conan Doyle's stories, which is some of the highest praise I could give an author.
In particular, I'm indebted to Poe for inspiring Conan Doyles's Sherlock Holmes, one of my favorite literary protagonists of all time. I actually think the Sherlock Holmes stories are better developed than Poe's detective tales, but one can forgive him since he pioneered the detective genre.

My favorite story, by far, was 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'. I love a good adventure story, and this was an epic that just went on and on and oooon....in a very good way. It also showed how incredibly educated the author was on everything from the breedings habits of sea-birds to handling a ship. I learnt so much about random subjects from this story.

I was going to try to list some of my other favorites, but there are just too many so I'm leaving it at this. (

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dorotheabaker | Nov 14, 2013 |

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1670297.html

I was completely unfamiliar with Poe's prose before launching into this collection of his complete stories. I must say that I wish I had bought a 'Best Of Poe' rather than a Complete Poe. The sad truth is that a lot of the stories are pretty rubbish. His philosophising about death and aesthetics is dull, his humourous pieces range from self-indulgent to racist (the Dutch being particular _targets) and the early romantic horror pieces are suffused with the icky self-loathing that you might get from an author who married his thirteen-year-old cousin and was then habitually unfaithful to her.

It's not all bad. Most of the really famous stories, the ones I had previously heard of, were indeed worth reading - Arthur Gordon Pym (I smiled when I saw the Ge'ez letters familiar to me from Ethiopia), the Dupin stories (though Sherlock Holmes rightly observes that he himself is better), the Fall of the House of Usher, the Cask of Amontillado, and basically everything that Zelazny references in his A Dark Travelling. Two stories I had not heard of that I also enjoyed were the end-of-the-world tale of Eiros and Charmion, and the doppelganger yarn of William Wilson. But Poe wrote an awful lot of rubbish as well, and you can skip it in good conscience. (

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nwhyte | Mar 7, 2011 |

This is very thrilling story.
I was interested in his book because Japanese famous writer Ranpo Edogawa is made by changing Edgar Allan Poe.
The story is nice.
But a little dreadful (

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Orix_Bluewave | Nov 21, 2010 |

The Balloon-Hoax - Wow. That was really boring.
Ms. Found in a Bottle - Good suspense, but the ending confused me.
A Descent into the Maelstrom - Not too memorable.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue - A rather silly Holmes-esque mystery tale.
The Purloined Letter - Not bad, but far too wordy.
The Black Cat - Deliciously disturbing.
The Fall of the House of Usher - Not as interesting as his others, but good atmosphere.
The Pit and the Pendulum - A delightful tale of suspense.
The Masque of the Red Death - Meh. Weird for no reason and kind of boring.
The Cask of Amontillado - I think makes Poe so memorable is his vivid first-person accounts from the point of view of a killer.
The Assignation - I couldn't follow this one. What did the drowning child and the art aficionado have to do with one another?
The Tell-Tale Heart - Funnier than I'd remembered. One of my all-time favorites.
Diddling - A random essay on swindling.
The Man That was Used Up - Silly, amusing, but ends a bit too abruptly.
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym - Some good bits, but I think I just don't like maritime fiction. (

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melydia | Dec 23, 2009 |

My first collection of the maestro's work. Inexorably moody. (

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gazzy | Mar 1, 2007 |

Edgar Allan Poe was the inventor of the thriller and made an very chilling work of his story "The Fall of the House of Usher". Being my favorite work of his besides "The Raven", I would recommend it to anyone. However, his stories all together are a bit too grim and gruesome for my taste. (

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miss_scarlet | Jan 5, 2007 |

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archivomorero | Jun 27, 2022 |

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archivomorero | Jun 27, 2022 |

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archivomorero | Jun 22, 2022 |

Stories read in this collection: Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter (

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nlgeorge | Aug 12, 2012 |

Wikipedia: "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. The story was first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839. It was heavily revised before being included in a collection of his fiction entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1845. It contains within it the poem The Haunted Palace, which had earlier been published separately in the April 1839 issue of the Baltimore Museum magazine.
Synopsis:
The tale opens with the narrator having arrived at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, after having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country, which complained of an illness and asked for his comfort. The symptoms of this illness include extreme hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, and tastes. It is revealed that Usher's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill, suffering from catalepsy. The narrator attempts to cheer Roderick by painting and reading with him, and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Usher sings The Haunted Palace. Usher tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be sentient, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it.
Usher informs the narrator that his sister has died and insists that she is entombed for two weeks in a vault in the house before being permanently buried. They inter her, but over the next week both Usher and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Usher comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm. He notices that the bog surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark, though there is no lightning. The narrator attempts to calm him by reading aloud The Mad Trist.
The story involves a knight who breaks into a hermit's dwelling and finds a palace guarded by a dragon, which he kills, and a brass shield, which falls off the wall. As he reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard. As he relates the shield falling off the wall, there is a metallic ringing sound. Usher gets up and exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was put in the vault. The bedroom door is blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She comes in and dies, falling on her brother, who also dies. The narrator quickly escapes from the house, and as he hurries away, sees the house break in two and the fragments sink into the tarn at its base.
Themes:
Poe always conveys one human characteristic in each of his short stories as one of his major themes. The theme that Poe conveys through this story is that of fear.
The doppelgänger theme, prominent in many of Poe's works, such as William Wilson, appears in The Fall of the House of Usher. The reflection of the house in the tarn is described in the opening paragraph, and "a striking similitude between the brother and sister" is mentioned when Madeline "dies".
The death and resurrection of a woman, a main theme in Ligeia and Morella, is also present here.
The theme of mental illness is explored in this work, as it is in numerous other tales such as Berenice.
Internment while alive is also explored in The Premature Burial and The Cask of Amontillado.
There are also various Gothic elements and signs of decay, such as the decrepit castle and tarn, which also reflect the mental condition of Usher, which is rapidly deteriorating. (

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