cover image Return to the House of Usher

Return to the House of Usher

Robert Poe. Forge, $22.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-312-86012-7

Robert Poe's slight purported sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story ""The Fall of the House of Usher"" neither illuminates the original tale nor engages the reader in a new vision. This contemporary update finds bourbon-swilling, 30-year-old John Charles Poe a struggling roving town reporter in Crowley Creek, Va. It's late November when college chum Dr. Roderick Usher contacts Poe to help investigate strange happenings at the Usher Sanatorium, which he and his psychiatrist sister, Madeleine, run on the grounds of the first House of Usher. Poe and his newly hired research assistant, a recent divorcee, set forth to battle the forces of good and evil, which apparently haunt the modern counterparts of the original characters. What this Poe adds is a subplot involving a series of bland secondary characters in a standard land-deal scheme. A termagant boss, a philandering mayor and a self-serving family lawyer try to outmaneuver a stereotypical money-laundering Mafia representative from New York. An attempt is made to create a gothic atmosphere with a group of wandering ghost patients, a routine slow poisoning, the obligatory mad doctor and the festering family secret that threatens the Usher household. Even the approach of a late-season hurricane does little to add any frightening suspense or to dispel a melodramatic and obvious ending. (Oct.)