H.P. Lovecraft said the genius of Edgar Allan Poe was that he expressed human sensations the way they really are. The sensations he was interested in describing were those of pain, decay, and terror.

Poe was carrying out a scientific examination of these three phenomena, studying them directly rather than relying on established literary forms; he wasn’t copying his favourite authors but was breaking new ground on his own.

Any great writer will eventually be sorted into a “tradition,” but what’s really interesting about an author is the thing they do that’s never been done before, or has never been done nearly so well or in quite the same way.

Poe would tend to take a single mood or impression as the basis for a story and then the tale becomes a study of that single thing. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is really a study of fear, specifically the way that fear is conjured up by the impression of a thing or person.

The story opens with the narrator catching a glimpse of the house where he will be staying and it making a horrific impression on him, with no redeeming quality at all:

“There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”

He thinks: well, who knows why the mind will sometimes play such a trick on us? I’ll look at the house from another angle and maybe it will look better. Nope! It looks just as bad from this angle too. There’s literally nothing good to say about it. There’s something uncanny about this: it’s as if the house is objectively evil, its malignity being an essential property of it so that you can’t see the house without feeling morally sick.

The house is present at every moment of the story, the whole purpose of the piece being to describe the horrific source of fear in order to shed some light on the nature of fear itself. And what’s interesting is most good short stories written since Poe have this exact same focus of subject matter and purpose, and “paring down of incidents” so as not to distract from the object and the climax of the story, so that you’d almost think what Poe is doing is fairly unremarkable, until you remember (as Lovecraft points out) that Poe really was the inventor of the short story in its current, modern form.

(I’ve been reading H.P. Lovecraft’s The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S.T. Joshi.)