Synopsis: From the back cover of the Berkley first edition: In Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. readers were introduced to a brother and sister unlike any in literature. Cursed by a terrible, tainted bloodline, Roderick and Madeline Usher surrendered to their most unnatural passions - passions that led the tortured man to seal his own sister alive, in a stone crypt. Miraculously, Madeline survived the horrifying ordeal, clawing her way out of the tomb... embracing her brother with bloodstained hands... and bringing the doomed House of Usher crumbling to the ground. What really happened that fateful night? What was the unspoken secret that cursed the family for generations? Marie Kiraly takes us back in time - to a dark and lonely night when a writer named Edgar Allan Poe receives a mysterious visitor. Her name is Pamela, and her son has been stolen away by a member of her husbands family. They are descendants of the infamous Ushers, whose strange history inspired Poe's most chilling tale. Moved by the mother's loss, Poe agrees to help Pamela. Thus begins his own descent into the maelstrom, where the master storyteller comes face-to-face with the woman he immortalized... and learns that Madeline's secret is as dark and twisted as the House of Usher itself.