Return to the House of Usher by Robert Poe (First Edition)

After its collapse, the foreboding ruins of Usher House lay untouched for 160 years outside Crowley, Virginia, until Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeleine, both physicians, rebuilt it as a sanatorium. Gloom and a sense of dread permeate this new house, too, and the modern Roderick, like his ancestor, is troubled by strange visions and mounting feelings of terror, especially concerning the health of his sister. Madeleine, who insists she is fine, grows paler and weaker by the day. With no one else to turn to for help, Roderick calls his old friend and former college roommate, John Charles Poe.
Poe is a reporter for Crowley's weekly paper - a job he took years ago, to prove to his father he wasn't a worthless son. Though he has long since inherited the family fortune, he hangs on at the paper for the same reason he drinks too much bourbon - it has become a daily habit.
On his thirtieth birthday, John Charles Poe received the most unusual part of his legacy - the casket, a three-foot-long wooden box containing the personal papers, journals, and literary notes of the Poe men, including Edgar Allan, whose notes on his classic short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," may contain the key to saving Madeleine and Roderick, the last of the Ushers.

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Psychological thriller debut by a distant relative of Edgar Allan Poe's that, while it will not win an Edgar, holds up as a consistently interesting tale, though more in the line of a Wilkie Collins mystery/romance than a Poe grotesquerie. Crowley Creek, Virginia, some 60 miles from Roanoke, is the location of the rebuilt House of Usher, now a sanitarium run by Drs. Roderick and Madeleine Usher, twins and descendants of the notorious Ushers made famous by Poe. Rod's best friend is John Charles Poe, a relative of Poe's, an independently wealthy man with a degree in English literature who nonetheless works as the sole, trod-upon reporter for Fanny Boynton's Crowley Sentinel. John Charles has inherited Crowley House, as well as a casket of private papers written by Edgar Allan himself (at Sotheby's these would, of course, be worth zillions, but that's never mentioned). Roderick goes balmy when Madeleine (she's a shrink) dies. Not only he but other patients at the sanitarium have seen ``ghosts'' of dead patients wandering the halls, and now Rod and even John Charles see the late Madeleine waltzing about. Throughout the story the supernatural is hinted at--but are the ghosts only a ploy by unscrupulous New York hoods who want to open a casino on Rod's grounds and use it for money laundering? Are the hoods in league with certain locals such as Fanny Boynton, lawyer Prynne, and the mayor? Do real ghosts blunder about the maze of tunnels through and under the House of Usher? And what of the copper-lined room where the original Madeleine was laid out and later awoke from premature burial? Will the Poe papers in the casket reveal to John Charles the abominable secret of the Ushers? And will the approaching monster hurricane do more than knock a few boards loose from the House of Usher? Less supernatural than the elder Poe--but the hidden papers of great poets always cast a spell. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

After Usher House sank into the tarn in Edgar Allan Poe's gloomy tale, Usher heirs rebuilt on the same tainted ground. When 160 years later descendants Rod and Madeleine Usher (doctors who operate the Usher House Sanatorium) start a downward spiral, history appears to be repeating itself, especially to John Charles Poe of Crowley Creek, Virginia, who attended college with Rod Usher and lives only a few miles from the sanatorium, where questionable medical practices are setting the stage for disaster. On his thirtieth birthday, John Charles receives a small casket filled with documents, some of which reveal secrets behind the famous Poe stories. When an approaching hurricane finally blows inland, it wreaks havoc on the community, heavily damaging the Usher property, which now most probably will not be developed into a Confederate-theme gambling resort being hustled by a smarmy character from up north. Robert Poe, a distant relative of E. A., has fashioned a far-fetched yet thought-provoking yarn. Jennifer Henderson