The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe: In the valley of the shadow of death

Filmmaker Mike Flanagan who earlier brought us eerie-yet-moving reimaginations of Shirley Jackson and Henry James, has now made Edgar Allan Poe for the small screen. His adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher arrives in October, and there could be no better time to step inside – or return to (for those who have already been-there, Poed-that) – the unnerving world of Edgar Allan Poe than now.

The miniseries is supposed to be loosely based on Poe’s short story of the same name, but also includes characters and storylines from several other works by Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher is the classic haunted house story – a gothic mansion, a family with a murky past, a narrator who has responded to an invitation from the owner of the mansion suffering from a mysterious illness and arrived at this desolate and dreary setting.

Whether it’s this one or his other well-known tales of the macabre, like The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of The Red Death or The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe’s genius lies in transporting the reader into the heart of the dread his protagonists are experiencing. Madness and revenge as pivotal facets of the human condition always seemed to have influenced his works, and Poe’s mind was never meant for the faint-hearted – the dead come back to life, pets are perversely tormented, corpses are dismembered, a person is buried alive in the feeble light of a catacomb.

In several of his stories, Poe used the first-person narrator which made them effectively unsettling; for the uninitiated, he’s also considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. Even if today’s readers struggle with his language initially – which certainly reads archaic now – his writings are so richly atmospheric that soon they’ll find themselves immersed and invested amidst the gloom and inevitable doom of his terrifying tales. In the story titled “Ligeia”, he wrote: “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” That also sums up his life and body of work perfectly.