Ligeia

The fact that we never see anything of the sort is much in the story's, it plays to the story's strengths.

In H.P. Lovecraft's essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, the fall of the House of Usher is listed alongside Ligeia.

as the pinnacle of Edgar Allan Poe's forays into what Lovecraft calls cosmic horror.

He considers the school of Gothic fiction to have really begun in earnest with Poe himself.

If it's built up slowly and suffuses the whole thing, then the dread will still be there after you close the pages of the book.

Let us now read Lovecraft's comments on this story specifically.

It is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and the Fall of the House of Usher, especially the latter, that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists.

Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident." Further down, he continues, after talking about Ligeia for a bit, Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history.

She had read Poe as a child and had been so terrified by him that she put him away for some twenty-five years.

But she now brought him back out again, and she read on the first night of this experiment in self-therapy Poe's story "Ligeia," which is the story of a dead woman who comes back to life.

To Poe, it was a wife.

To Marie, it seemed obvious that it was a mother.

I can't remember if we watched it all together or if it was just the two of us, where he is, like, the proprietor of this weird old estate, and he wears sunglasses all the time.

Oh, wasn't that Ligeia?

And it's like ...

Yeah.

Ligeia?

Yes.

It's a, that's also a Poe story.

Tome of Ligeia.