Usher's Passing

by Robert McCammon

In the heavy air, lightning crackled and thrust at the earth, striking the high Gothic steeple of James Renwick’s new Grace Church on East Tenth Street, then sizzling to death a half-blind drayhorse on the squatters’ flatlands north of Fourteenth.

We have the word "gothic" in the first paragraph! Let's go!

It was the twenty-second of March, 1847,

“Mr. Edgar Poe?” the gentleman in black asked quietly. “Yes,” the writer replied, his voice slurred from sickness and sherry. “Who’re you?”

Oh, Poe is actually in this!