mediate family. The narrator is a visitor to the
Ushers who is immediately impressed with the
sense of gloom and decay that adheres to the place
and its residents.
He is the guest of his childhood friend Roder-
ick Usher, an artist and musician lately afflicted
with such a sensitivity to all stimuli that it makes
him shun everything except bland food, gentle
light, and soft sounds. Roderick and his sister,
Madeline, who is reportedly terminally ill, are the
last of the Ushers. Usher is convinced that there is
a kind of low-level intelligence that exists un-
known to us and that can imbue a place or a struc-
ture with a distinct personality. When Madeline
dies Usher announces that he plans to treat her
body with preservatives and delay its final inter-
ment for a time. The coffin containing the surpris-
ingly lifelike body is thus held temporarily while
Usher reconciles himself to the death of the sister
he now announces was his twin.
Usher’s health and mental stability decline
rapidly, and even the narrator refers to him as a
“hypochondriac” whose mind is affecting his body.
He is particularly disturbed one stormy night, so
the narrator reads from a novel to him in an effort
to soothe his friend. Just as he reaches the descrip-
tion of a man bursting through a door, they both
hear the sound of rending wood from somewhere
in the house. Later there comes a distant shriek.
Finally Usher admits that Madeline was entombed
while still alive, that his hypersensitive hearing had
detected the sounds of her struggles days before,
but that he was too frightened to act. Madeline ap-
pears, Roderick dies of fright in her arms, and the
narrator flees into the night, barely escaping when
the house is destroyed in a landslide. Inextricably
linked with the family, it could not survive their
extinction.
This particular story was a very obvious influ-
ence on later writers, particularly H. P. LOVECRAFT,
who similarly included references to fictional books
of occult lore. Ray BRADBURYretold the same story
satirically in “Usher II” (1950) but set it on Mars,
and Usher’s Passing(1984) by Robert McCAMMON
reframes the story in a contemporary setting,
chronicling the fate of the “real” family whose
plight formed the basis of Poe’s classic short story.
Poe’s original has been filmed several times, of
which the best rendition was produced in 1960.
The climactic image of horror, of being buried
alive, recurs in Poe’s “The Premature Burial”
(1944).“The Far Islands”John Buchan(1889)
The vast majority of John Buchan’s more than 80
books contain no element of the fantastic, and he
is certainly best remembered for The Thirty-Nine
Steps(1915), an early spy novel. He also produced
several less-known but still significant supernatural
and historical fantasies and was almost certainly an
influence on the work of Robert E. HOWARD. This
particular story is also something of a compressed
family saga starting with Colin, an associate of the
legendary Bran Mak Morn, whose fascination with
the supposed lands to the west of the British Isles is
carried by some supernatural means down through
subsequent generations, until we reach the main
story, featuring Colin Raden, latest in that distin-
guished line.
Raden is seriously ill as a youth and spends
considerable time in the traditional family home-
land, where he imagines—or perhaps sees—visions
of magical islands across the sea. As a young man
he is athletic, handsome, intelligent, and a born
leader, but he is also introspective, forgetful, and
distanced from others. He continues to have recur-
ring dreams, but there is also some progression
within them, providing enhanced hints of what he
might one day find. He is not drawn to female
companions because they somehow disrupt the
dream, which has quietly become central to his
life. If the reader has any lingering doubt about the
fantastic content, Buchan dispels it at this point by
having the protagonist speak eloquently in a lan-
guage he never learned. A researcher who believes
that hallucinations sometimes run in families fails
to understand the depth of Raden’s belief in his
dream.
War breaks out, and Raden serves loyally and
heroically, although his ability to function in the
real world is increasingly constrained because he
can no longer control the visions. Ultimately, he is
fatally wounded on the battlefield, but at the mo-
ment of his death, he is perhaps magically trans-
ported to that far island of his imagination and“The Far Islands” 113