How I learned to stop worrying and love Edgar Allan Poe

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel Hmmm.... an incestuous perv...
..."And then you went away to college, and Poe, suddenly, wasn't cool anymore.

Who knows why it happened. Maybe it was your jerk of a Freshman English professor, who sniffily dismissed his prose as overripe and purple and – most woundingly – fervid. Or maybe it was that time you read one of his poems aloud and realized that the rigid rhyme schemes you'd previously savored for their steady, inexorable drumbeat now made his poetry sound weirdly simplistic, like so many bouncy commercial jingles commissioned by Despar itself. Maybe it was how everyone around you had now moved on to the lurid, gore-flecked immediacy of Stephen King and Clive Barker to get their literary willies, and only rolled their eyes at Poe's baroque and comparatively prim diversions.

Or maybe it was the whole "married his 13-year-old cousin" thing.

I was thinking about all this as I watched writer/director Mike Flanagan's pretty terrific The Fall of the House of Usher, all eight episodes of which drop on Netflix next Thursday.

Like some of Flanagan's other Netflix work (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Midnight Club), Usher takes several works by a given author (in the aforementioned examples, Shirley Jackson, Henry James and uh ... Christopher Pike, respectively), tosses them into a narrative blender and presses liquefy.

The result is a spooky, darkly funny tale made to get gobbled up over a crisp and chilly October weekend. It follows the rough outline of the Poe short story it's named for (doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher, an old house, a cursed bloodline, etc.). But Flanagan stuffs every episode with references to other Poe-etical works."...