Publisher's Synopsis
The Fall of the House of Usher is the quintessential gothic tale: a haunted house, a gloomy landscape, two twin brothers, a mysterious illness. All the elements of the genre are easily identifiable, and yet part of the terror this story inspires is due to its vagueness; we cannot say for sure where in the world or exactly when the story takes place. We are alone with the narrator in this haunted space, and neither we nor the narrator know why. First published in 1839, it is one of Poe's works preferred by critics and the one that the author himself considered the most successful that he had written.
