"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. Although Poe wrote this short story before the invention of modern psychological science, Roderick's condition can be described according to its terminology. It includes...

Poe's preference for not naming his narrators is potent once again in "The Tell-Tale Heart", a story that is trying so hard to appear sane, but fails miserably in the end. With minute preparations, perfect calculations, and even more precise execution of the conceived gruesome act, the narrator successfully fulfils his purpose, only to be lost in a battle with his sanity and guilt afterwards. Backed by the numerous movie and theatrical adaptations,...

With her life in disarray after her Appa's extramarital affair and subsequent departure, Ji-won, plagued by horrifying yet enticing dreams of bloody rooms full of eyes, is overcome by hunger and rage that can only be sated by deceit, manipulation and murder as victims accumulate around her college campus.

The story opens with the narrator recounting a summer sea voyage from aboard the ship 'Independence'. The narrator learns that his old college friend Cornelius Wyatt is aboard with his wife and two sisters, though he has reserved three state-rooms. After conjecturing the extra room was for a servant or extra baggage, he learns his friend has brought on board an oblong pine box: "It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth." The narrator...

"I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain." In this intriguing literary fragment-published seventeen years after Bram Stoker's most famous novel-an English visitor to southern Germany suffers a terrifying ordeal on Walpurgis Nacht: the night when, according to local tradition, supernatural horrors are set free to walk the earth. But...

Inspired by Poe's own tragic life, the short story clearly presages Freud's method of psychoanalysis. In a very Fight-club-like plot and situations, "William Wilson" is a journey within the mind. Some sixty years prior to Freud's clinical work and theoretical developments, Poe's story is an example of the rise of the psychological genre in literature. A fruitful, and at the same time paranoid, the theme of the doppelganger runs strong in Edgar Allan...

Perhaps fitting for a horror short story, the devil is in the details in Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (1842). A benighted traveller finds shelter in an abandoned mansion in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. Inside he gets absorbed by a stunning painting and decides to delve into its origins with the help from a book he finds on a pillow. The story revolves around the complex and often tragic relationship between life and art. As per usual Poe can't help...

Both dreading and looking forward to his tenth high school reunion, Will James returns to his hometown, eager to catch up on old friends, only to find a strange, alternative universe in which realities fade and "other" memories begin to block them out, terrifying memories that threaten to remake the entire world, unless Will can stop it.

Few American novels written this century have endured in th heart and mind as has this one-Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow

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Inspired by the developments in cryptography and the gradually emerging detective fiction, "The Gold-Bug" surely got mixed critical reception from the public. Hailed as both "ingenious" and "trashy", the story's influence cannot be neglected, and surely Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" can vouch for that. What is more, the use of cipher in the story brought to the fore the interest in puzzles and hidden objects that would later be developed...