Harry Clarke's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' — Edgar Allan Poe

More hallucinatory than even Aubrey Beardsley's darkest plates, this Harry Clarke masterwork rivals his celebrated illustrations for Poe's 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination' in sheer visionary fever. Two cadaverous scholars tumble through a vortex alongside an open grimoire, while a roaring dragon-demon coils below and a bleeding, cruciform female figure is impaled on jagged timbers in the foreground — a cascade of Gothic horror rendered in Clarke's signature watercolor-and-ink style, vibrating with crimson blood, sickly yellows, and spectral grays.