If you're trying to decide whether to reconnect with your creepy old childhood friend who lives in a fungus covered mansion deep in the woods with a secret twin sister, this episode is for you!* We're talking about “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is goth icon Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story about twincest. We dig into the uncanny, phrenology, family trees, and olde timey doctoring...and while we were digging we just may have found someone buried alive under these many layers of nineteenth-century degeneracy and weirdness! Hey, we all make mistakes.

If you want to read up on Freud's uncanny, his 1919 work The Uncanny is the perfect place to start. For more about the uncanny in American literature, check out American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus

*Note: do not, under any circumstances, rekindle any friendship. Friendship is unnecessary. That is why you have podcasts.