A crumbling mansion, a family line rotting from within, and a narrator who begins to suspect the house itself is alive with dread — Poe's masterpiece of Gothic horror builds its terror out of atmosphere alone, one exquisitely unsettling image at a time. Roderick Usher's final days, and the fate of his sister Madeline, remain one of horror fiction's most influential and imitated set pieces. Short, dense, and genuinely frightening, exactly as intended.