Edgar Allan Poe: the man all tortured artists aspire to be. Man, that guy had everything. Parental abandonment, financial ruin, alcoholism, a dead wife, and an appropriately mysterious death at age 40. The man was a legend... A legend with a lot of issues, mind you, but a legend nonetheless. Now, depending on your age; when someone describes something as "GOTHIC", I'd imagine that different things spring to mind. Those of you in the younger generations are likely primarily familiar with the Goth fashion movement. Meanwhile, for those of you who were already adults in the 90s, Tim Burton's iconic aesthetic of striped spirals and moribund comedy is probably predominant. For those somewhat older, the term instead likely recalls Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi, and Christopher Lee's more traditional form of the macabre, with their deep, baritone voices and stylish opera capes. And if you happen to be of the undead variety, born or spawned before the mid 1800s, then I imagine the term excites feelings of happy nostalgia for the dark, misty streets of an England that knew to fear the night. Now, the origins of Gothic literature are rather complex, but they're mostly attributed to three things: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Bram Stoker's "Dracula"- and literally everything ever written by Edgar Allan Poe. Let me know if it sounds like one of these people contributed more than the others, because I have a sneaking suspicion that Shelley and Stoker stuck Poe with most of the work on this particular group project, and I'd like to assign grades appropriately. Mostly known for his POE-try, (a joke that I cannot claim credit for and would not want to) Edgar Allan Poe also wrote several iconic horrific short stories, usually about madness, torture, death - all that good stuff. Cheerful guy! Now, there isn't enough time in the day to summarize all of them, so instead we're gonna be looking at a selection of the absolute creepiest among them. Mostly because they're my favorites. What, you wanted a more substantial reason? WELL, YOU'RE IN *MY* DOMAIN NOW, AND I MAKE THE RULES! So first up, we've got a little number that I like to call "The Pit and the Pendulum". I call it that because that's... what it's called. This is the only one of today's stories with a sympathetic protagonist, and it's also something like a spiritual predecessor to SAW, so get ready to sympathize with our hapless and unnamed protagonist a lot, because Poe is one creative bastard when it comes to finding ways to torture people in increasingly
improbable ways. So our story begins with our hero being sentenced to death. Encouraging start. So our hero, who for the sake of argument, I'll call "Fred," is currently in the clutches of none other than the Spanish Inquisition. Yeah, it can be easy to forget that, despite their overall silliness in modern representations, the Spanish Inquisition was a terrifying juggernaut of a court system. Keep in mind, however, that the events of this story are not actually in keeping with historical documentation of the time. According to actual Inquisition rules, Fred would have been executed by the tried and true method of burning at the stake, rather than the oddly convoluted method of execution Fred finds himself in when he wakes up. So, Fred wakes up in a pitch-black cell, and, after confirming that he hasn't been buried alive- --No, that's another story-- --he wanders around the cell a little and confirms that it's big, it's dark, and hey, it's got a giant pit in the middle of it. So that's the Pit part, but what about the Pendulum? Well, I'm glad you asked! Fred blacks out again, and when he wakes up, he's been strapped to a table with a huge, razor-sharp pendulum swinging overhead. Wow, it looks like the time-honored tradition of the villain dropping the hero into a death trap and leaving him there unsupervised is even older than I thought! Fred, however, doesn't consider this as interesting as we do, and instead decides to take in the scenery - which now includes a whole bunch of rats. Charming. So Fred eventually thinks to look up again when he finds- SHOCK! HORROR! Not at all predictably! The pendulum has lowered, and is now
swinging significantly closer to him than he'd like. So Fred, faced with this terrifying development, opts to take another nap- Focus, goddamn it! And when he wakes up he has a brilliant plan: To use the conveniently-placed rats and a conveniently placed chunk of meat to escape his bonds! Later renditions of the Hero in a Deathtrap scenario replaced the conveniently placed rats with rather more glamorous solutions, such as conveniently placed broken glass, or conveniently placed plasma cutter. So Fred and his new rat buddies work on freeing him, but time, as they say, is not on his side. Fortunately, he is still a protagonist, and law dictates that he escape just as the pendulum reaches him. So Fred is free of the death trap, only to find that the Inquisition prepared for that eventuality by sticking the death trap inside another death trap! This one's rather more traditional in execution, albeit with a twist. The walls start closing in, and also, the walls are on fire. So the aforementioned burning wall things start forcing Fred into the pit, and he is once again mere inches from death when a conveniently placed French army bursts in to save him at the last moment. The end. On to the next exciting tale on our roster, The Masque of Red Death. The eponymous Red Death, we are told, is a terrifyingly lethal plague, that makes you sweat blood and die in half an hour. Our nominal hero, Prince Prospero, wants nothing to do with all this tedious death business, so he calls all his nobleman buddies and they hole up in one of his fancy abbeys and seal the doors behind them. So while the peasantry drop like flies outside the gates, Prospero and his buddies party up a storm for six months. One day, Prospero decides to hold a masked ball, because nothing bad ever happens in masked balls, and he sets it up all fancy-like so the ball takes place in seven rooms of different colors, with the last one being--you guessed it--red. Anyway, in the red room, there's also this big fancy clock that chimes on the hour, and every time it does, the guests stop partying until it stops making noise, and then start up again. Wow, it's almost like the awareness of the inevitability of time is weighing on them a little. I'm sure it's nothing. So, anyway, after several hours of partying, the clock strikes midnight. A few of the guests notice that there appears to be a new face on the dance floor. He's wearing a gaudy red costume and a creepy red mask. Hmmm. I wonder who he could be. So Prospero is more pissed off at the gaucheness of the costume than he is at the party crashing, because he's an idiot, and he demands the stranger unmask himself so they know who to hang at dawn. The red guy, unsurprisingly, doesn't comply, instead walking through the seven party rooms to the final red room. Are you sensing a theme in the colors here? I think I'm starting to sense a theme in the colors here. So Prospero reacts like any good host would, and chases the errant stranger down with a knife. At which point, the red guy shoots him a dirty look and Prospero dies instantly. This understandably wigs out the partygoers, who tear the costume off, only to find -- ta-da! There was nobody inside it, and then they all die too. So after that tale of a party gone wrong, it's only fair that we follow it up with another tale of a party gone wrong. A charming vignette by the name of The Cask of Amontillado. This is where we transition from our heroes and/or narrators being at least marginally good people to a rather more morally ambiguous stance on -- Oh, who am I kidding? They're all admitted murderers! So the POV character in The Cask of Amontillado is Montresor, a... guy? He's a nobleman or something. You don't really need to know that much about him, since his primary defining feature is that he has this friend who he really hates. Why are they still friends, you might ask? Well, you know. It's like the Shakespearean duo, Iago and Othello. When you've known someone for so long and experienced so much together, when they start getting on your nerves a little, you don't just write them off like it's nothing. You work to preserve your friendship, because when all is said and done, nothing on this Earth is more satisfying than looking into their eyes one day and seeing the hope drain from their face as in one fell swoop you destroy them and all they hold dear. Go read Othello. It's great. So anyway, Montresor's so-called friend is called Fortunato, a name that will become increasingly ironic as the story progresses. Now, Montresor never actually tells us what Fortunato did to him to make him hate him so much. But he assures us that his reasoning is sound, and Fortunato is just, like, the worst. Come on. What reason would he have to lie to us? He seems like a trustworthy fella. So, luckily for Montresor, Fortunato has one fatal flaw: Drunkenness. Our boy Fortunato is apparently quite the connoisseur of fine wines. So Montresor decides to put his plan into motion during the carnival season, which Wikipedia tells me is basically three straight days of drinking in silly costumes. So Montresor happens to bump into Fortunato one evening at the height of the carnival, and tells him that he happens to have bought a Cask of Amontillado, as it happens, and he's keeping it in the basement of his castle. So the very drunk Fortunato jumps at the opportunity to get even more drunk, and he and Montresor make a beeline for our... nominal hero's castle, which is conveniently devoid of any potential witnesses. Wow, it's almost like Montresor set this up or something. So they go into the catacombs of Montresor's castle, conveniently already full of dead people, and come to a small chamber in which is housed the cask of Amontillado. Or not. The chamber is actually empty except for all those aforementioned dead people. While Fortunato is thus distracted trying to locate the fictitious booze, Montresor surreptitiously chains him to the wall. Jesus, no one's that drunk. So Fortunato's like, 'Bro, what gives?' and Montresor's like, 'Man, you look kind of chilled. Better do what we can to keep out the draft.' and starts walling up the alcove with Fortunato chained up inside. It's like being buried alive, only more interactive. So Fortunato rapidly goes through all five stages of 'my best friend is murdering me right this very second' grief, and right as Montresor is about to put in the final stone, he's like, 'Ha. Oh, man, bro, you got me good, but we'll have a good laugh about this over the Amontillado, am I right?' and Montresor's like, 'Sure we will, buddy.' and Fortunato's like, 'Dude!' and Montresor's like, "Dude, indeed.' And this part's actually a little weird, because Montresor gets really huffy when Fortunato finally shuts up. 'Fortunato. I'm gonna slide the last rock into place. You okay in there, buddy?' And Fortunato doesn't respond, so he's like, 'Ugh, fine. God, it's like we're not even friends anymore or something.' and puts the last brick in, and there, he cheerfully tells us, Fortunato has stayed for 50 years. Man, with friends like these, right? And that brings us to the fourth and final short story on this, the spoopiest of all nights of the year. Continuing the trend of Edgar Allan Poe favoring homicidal maniacs as his narrators, our final story, The Tell-Tale Heart, begins with our narrator insisting that he's super 100% sane, you guys. Anyone will tell you that this is the most reassuring thing you can ever say to anybody under any circumstances. I mean, who wouldn't want to know for certain that you were sane? A crazy person, that's who. But I digress. So our narrator explains that he lived with this friendly old man who just happened to have an effed up eye, and it gave him the jeebies whenever the old man looked at him with it. Well, what's a totally sane person to do in that situation but to plot the old man's murder over the course of a week, shining a light into his bedroom every night at midnight to see if the evil eye was open? Because, of course, it would be wrong to kill him if the eye was shut. That's just common sense. So our narrator explains that on the eighth night when he checks on the old man, it turns out the old dude wasn't quite asleep, and after an extremely tense hour of the narrator standing really still and hoping the old man hadn't noticed him, Narrator, after checking to see the evil eye was open, obviously--he isn't crazy, decides that the sound of the old man's heartbeat is just getting really annoying. How could he hear that from all the way over there, you might ask? He's crazy! So the narrator zips in and murders the old man, for a super rational reason, of course, but then finds himself with a body on his hands. But that's no problem a little strategic dismemberment won't solve. Our narrator buries the old man in several pieces under the floorboards of the house, because, you know, that's a totally sane decision that wouldn't raise suspicion at all, but he's scarcely finished his work when who should arrive at his doorstep but three officers of the law. As it turns out, murdering your elderly roommate at 1:00 in the morning is liable to wake the neighbors. Take notes, kids. So the narrator invites the cops in and takes them on a tour of the house, which is, of course, immaculate, despite all the... murder that just happened, and our narrator puts the cops at ease with his charm and carefree attitude. Now, come on, could a crazy person do that? But our narrator starts getting a little twitchy when he begins to hear a faint rhythmic sound at the edge of his senses, and it almost sounds like a heartbeat. But he's not crazy! He swears. He just has crazy good hearing. Ayyy. So the heartbeat keeps getting louder, and after a while he realizes that it's coming from under the floorboards. And he's certain that the cops must be hearing it too, since it's practically deafening him at this point. So he decides obviously the cops know he's guilty, and are dragging out the pseudo interrogation just to torment him. It doesn't take long before the narrator snaps under the strain and confesses the murder to the increasingly confused cops, demanding to know why the old man's heart has the audacity to continue beating. This is a time-honored policeman strategy known as good cop, crazy perp. And that concludes today's dive into the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. Say what you will about him, but the man was an absolute pro when it came to More like absolute POE, am I right? Eh? Eh? Get out. Eh, fair enough. Happy Halloween, everybody. Ha-POE Halloween, am I right? RRRRGHHH... Hey, Gregory. Want me to show you where I keep my amontillado? Do I? THIS IS HALLOWEEN
THIS IS HALLOWEEN
