The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings

The lines from 'Ligeia' epitomize the familiar Poe, the arch-priest of Gothic horror, author of The Masque of the Red Death' and The Pit and the Pendulum'. That Poe, unquestioned master of 'the Grotesque and Arabesque', is fully represented here, but the volume also includes generous selections from his poetry and critical writings.

Together they amount to a portrait of a complex personality, that of a conscious aesthete, the most exotic of American writers, who was at the same time keenly engaged in an astonishing variety of interests. Nor are the "Grotesque' tales the simple manipulations of terror that they seem; David Galloway's introduction reveals their author as a profoundly serious writer, whose investigations of extreme states of consciousness have a particular relevance for our time.