The Gothic short stories of Edgar Allan Poe are characterized by an unexpected, usually twisted, occurrence at the end. In the middle of The Fall of the House of Usher, for example, the narrator helps a school friend, Roderick Usher, entomb his twin sister Madeleine in a vault in the family home. At the end, however, not only does the supposedly dead Madeleine come back to life, her reappearance seems to bring about both the death of her brother and the literal collapse of the family home. What exactly the narrator sees in the form of Madeleine, however, is not clear. He may see a hallucin…
