the masque of the red death by edgar allan poe

We present “The Masque of the Red Death” as our Story of the Week selection. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its Avatar and its sealthe redness and the horror of blood. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. One prominent school of critics believes that Poe meant the story as a parody, or a pastiche, or perhaps even an homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne, since it seems to combine several elements and even phrases from stories in the collection Twice-Told Tales, a book Poe reviewed in the same issue of the magazine in which “Masque” appeared.Įven if Poe lifted bits of Hawthorne to create his tale, the result is something else altogether-a haunting, prescient fable that couldn’t have been written by anyone else. The Masque of the Red Death THE Red Death had long devastated the country.

Yet, despite the simplicity of the tale and the obviousness of its “moral,” the story has spawned hundreds of pages of commentary on Poe’s possible sources, the story’s obscure references, and its more ambiguous meanings. Yet in that narrow span, Poe offers a cautionary tale about humanity in a plague time, and the wages of inequity and denial.”įor all its brevity, “Masque” has remained one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories, and it has (for obvious reasons) been much in the news this year. “There’s not much to ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ which was published in 1842: The story runs just 15 paragraphs, barely 2,300 words. “It’s almost too on the nose,” wrote David Ulin recently in the Los Angeles Times. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”įrom Selected Tales, with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym “The dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet.” Illustration (cropped and tinted) by Irish artist Harry Clarke (1889–1931) for an edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London, 1919).

The masque of the red death by edgar allan poe