“The Fall of the House of Usher”
I always thought I had read this short story thirty years ago or so already, because it was included in a volume that my parents had at home… but I could not remember much. I had a vague image of a decrepit vacant mansion being invaded by the surrounding vegetation, and ultimately destroyed by it.
Then in December last year my wife and I visited Ronda in Southern Spain, and I was fascinated by this old mansion, Casa del Rey Moro. Visiting the house, and reading about its history, the House of Usher (or the distorted memory I had of it) came to my mind immediately, and I resolved to read Poe's story (again?) soon.
Finally last Sunday I started reading it, finding myself with a little spare time and no book at hand — only my phone with my Kindle account and a handful documents I had downloaded there recently.
So, I just looked it up and, yes, in the previous millennium I must have read “The Fall of the House of Usher”, together with a few other short stories (some of the others I remember better… I think):
Well, the story's good. It's less evocative or depressive than I remembered it: Poe is fixated on succinctness, so there's little time for descriptions, or to let the whole atmosphere sink in. Also, the vegetation is far less of a character than I remembered — it's not like ivy becomes conscious and creeps up the walls until it swallows the house, like I remembered.
For some reason the mansion I have in my head is far more scary and interesting than what I got from the story. I guess that over the years I've cooked a mishmash of Usher, assorted haunted mansions, other horror stories, video games, illustration, photos of urbex, of Gunkanjima, and of exclusion zones, etc — and ended up with the most fascinating abstract idea of an abandoned building being consumed by plants that I am capable of. And it's easier for me now to get agitated by an image of the House of Usher than by the short story itself.
For instance, I just created this with the help of some generative machine learning model, and I love it, regardless of how accurately it represents the Usher estate:
