Can gothic texts, particularly those by Edgar Allan Poe, end in death?

Poe is fascinated by death, but more than that, by the state of mind contemplating death creates. Death figures in many of Poe's works:

• In his poem "Annabel Lee," Annabel dies in her "kingdom by the sea," and the poet lies "all the night-tide" by her "tomb by the sounding sea."


• In the story "The Black Cat," the narrator is filled with irrational rage and guilt over Pluto, the family cat, which he hanged, resulting in the murder of his wife. In "The Tell Tale Heart," the murder is similarly precipitated by the narrator's irrational loathing of the old man's eye.


• In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the story ends with Roderick and Madeline at each other's throats as the house itself comes crashing down around them.

So in a sense, yes, the stories can end with death. What Poe is interested in is not death itself so much as the emotion death, or coming near to death, can evoke. One way to look at Poe's method in these stories is to see them as "narrative machines" which produce an emotion in the reader—dread. As such, the "fuel" these machines require is death, or the near-death experience.

On the other hand, if what you mean by "ending in death" is the death of the narrator, that is another matter altogether. Poe was fascinated by the idea of alternate worlds—mysterious civilizations, unknown continents, and the like. In his science fiction, particularly stories like "MS Found in a Bottle" or "Descent Into A Maelstrom," or his one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator is always swept away at the end by some fearsome cataract or other, beyond which an unknowable secret awaits. So, perhaps these stories end in the "death" of the narrator, whose story is somehow preserved by the discovery at a later date of a manuscript of one sort or another.