Edgar Allan Poe 
The Fall of the House of Usher [EPUB ebook] 

The real protagonist of The Fall of the House of Usher, a masterpiece by Edgar Allan Poe written in 1839, is the dark pond in front of the ancient manor where the narrating self arrives, urgently convened by his friend Roderick Usher, not heard for many years. When he arrives in the evening near the great house of ancestry — belonging to an ancient family, capable of maintaining the considerable original heritage undisturbed over the centuries — his attention is magnetized by the pond, with strange chills and strange sensations, as if those waters blacks hide an omen of death, or in any case of ruin: a presage confirmed by the appearance of the house, old but not crumbling, from the outer walls entirely covered with small mushrooms, yet apparently still solid, able to challenge endlessly the wear and tear weather. Introduced by a servant in the presence of his childhood friend, the narrative self continues to experience negative feelings, but immediately focuses on the conditions of Roderick, who finds himself in a state of severe psychic alteration, to which he attempts to give positivist definitions.: nervous weakness, cerebral hyperactivity, exhaustion and so on. That same evening his strenuous dialogue with Roderick is interrupted by the appearance of his sister, Lady Madeline, who silently crosses the large room where the two are, and then disappears, like an autistic ghost, on the upper floors. Usher explains to his friend that Madeline is very ill, suffers from continuous attacks of catalepsy and has not much left to live. And the narrating self, meanwhile intent on diverting Roderick reading novels and stories, no longer has the opportunity to see her. And in the meantime the sinister signs multiply, but always as little nuances, fleeting clues, indecipherable presentations. Until the friend tells him that Madeline is dead, and that he has decided to stay for a while the coffin in a basement of the house, so as to avoid immediate publicity at the funeral event with the burial in the family tomb, far away and too exposed . The two perform the pitiful office, but in a night of terrible storm all the disquieting omens find their fulfillment, and in a horrendous tregenda the fate of disappearance of the Usher and their house, which in fact collapses into the black pond, is deposited last of a non-solvent mystery.