The Masque of the Red Death

The Masque of the Red Death is a gothic horror tale written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in Graham's Magazine. The story follows the traditional structure of gothic narrative and is considered an allegory about the inevitability of death.

The story takes place in the castellated abbey of Prince Prospero, whom Poe calls "happy and dauntless and sagacious". Prospero and 1,000 other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land.

The disease is so brutal that its whole course takes half an hour, beginning with sharp pains and dizziness and ending in bleeding at the pores. Prospero and his retinue completely ignore the terror and suffering of the population and will stay in their fortified refuge, enjoying all kinds of luxuries.

Inside, Prospero throws a masked ball through seven rooms, each lit in a single color, the last of them black and lit in red, where an ebony clock strikes the hour and stops the dancing every time. Into that last room walks a masked figure dressed as a victim of the plague.

The story was made into a film of the same name in 1964, starring Vincent Price and Hazel Court.

"The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution."