First on the list of research reading for my new novel:

“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe.

The protags in my story would definitely read Poe, if only for his gift for atmosphere. Atmosphere is something I definitely need to work on, though my descriptions will never be as good as Poe’s.

-1- an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn-a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

-2- I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

-3- And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

-4- An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.

I particularly like his description of seemingly baseless anxiety-it does feel like something daemonic and heavy has taken up residence on one’s chest.

My Sister in This House by Wendy Kesselman

No quotes from this one, but it’s a play about the Papin sisters, two young maids who live in a house with their stifling boss and her perpetually soon-to-be-married daughter. It reads with subtley, though on stage the too-close relationship between the sisters is more obvious. It was made into a film called Sister, My Sister , a title that sounds like some sort of feminist manifesto from the 60s.