A gothic short story by Edgar Allan Poe in which a narrator visits the gloomy, decaying mansion of his friend Roderick Usher. Through a thick atmosphere of dread and decline, it explores isolation, madness, and the fate of an old family. Brief but haunting.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER BY EDGAR ALLAN POE Son cœur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne. De Béranger. 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, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was— but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation
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