Poe's Quintessential Halloween Story

In this special Halloween edition of Mind Travel, we celebrate Halloween with a look at a story by--you guessed it--Edgar Allan Poe.  This is not just any Poe story, but the quintessential Halloween story, one featuring a costume party--the "Masque" in the title--and a murderous villain.

Spoiler alert: You may want to read the story, which is among the shortest of Poe's classic tales, before you read this column, because I do give away the end.  Then again, it's a Poe horror story, so you know it's not going to end well.

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It's a party!  There will be costumes, music, eerie lighting.  You show up in your weird getup, and everything is just as you hoped--even better.  You're dancing with friends, taking in the atmosphere, but then . . .

Some creep has shown up with a costume so terrifying, so tasteless, so outré that you'd like to throw him out, but he marches right past everyone and wrecks the party by killing everybody.

It's not a horror movie.  It's Edgar Allan Poe.

The Perfect Villain

This is the plot, in so many words, of "The Masque of the Red Death," one of Poe's best stories.  Although it is not as well-known as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum," I think it's more terrifying, especially for us modern readers.

On the surface, it's a classic horror story, complete with a remote setting, grotesque figures, blood, death, and, well, horror.  Like many of Poe's stories, it has a mysterious, non-descript, antiquated setting: the realm of a certain Prince Prospero.  If you know Poe's work, you know what I mean: "many and many year ago / in a kingdom by the sea . . ."

In this case, however, the real villain is something alive and well today: disease.  Poe expertly introduces this villain in the story's first paragraph, one of his best openings:

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had been ever so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avator and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleedings at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest-ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease were the incidents of half an hour.

I don't know for certain that Poe was trying to write something timeless, but he did.  Indeed, epidemics and pandemics have taken countless human lives over the centuries.  The bubonic plague, or "Black Death," alone killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in just seven years in the fourteenth century.  Of course, we know all too well the impact of a global pandemic.  Just a few years ago, we began hearing of COVID, which would kill nearly 7 million.

Disease makes a terrifying villain for a variety of reasons.  Diseases such as the plague and COVID can be fatal, and, in the case of Poe's fictional "Red Death," painful to experience and horrible to behold.  Furthermore, the agents carrying the diseases--viruses, for example--are invisible to the naked eye, so we literally never see them coming for us.  Perhaps most unsettling of all is the way they spread--through our fellow human beings.  You might say that disease turns our family and friends into unwilling enemies, capable of infecting and even killing us.

Poe capitalizes on such aspects of disease in "The Masque of the Red Death."  The first paragraph, quoted above, explicitly refers to its deadly nature, the "sharp pains" it brings, and its "hideous" manifestation, which involves "profuse bleedings at the pores" and even "dissolution."  The "pest-ban," furthermore, points to the danger of commingling with fellow humans.  The Red Death is indeed the stuff of which horror is made.

Deeper Than Horror

There's more to this story, though.  Poe may have turned from writing poetry to writing horror fiction because he suspected it would sell.  In a letter to a publisher in the early 1830s, he defended his sensational (and downright weird) story "Berenice", saying the public embraced this kind of fiction.  Still, we should always remember that Poe was a literary genius interested in more than getting a rise out of readers (and earning a paycheck, albeit a measly one, in the process).  He was fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, by human psychology, and he often explored it in his short stories, even if his use of symbolism, setting, and plot requires us to do some interpretation to decipher his meaning.

It is significant, for example, that "The Masque of the Red Death" features revelers in fantastic costumes, rooms illuminated unnaturally in various colors, and, most notably, a prominent clock whose chimes momentarily paralyze the revelers.  This is a dreamscape (similar to but distinct from the one in "The Pit and the Pendulum"), and time threatens it because every dream must come to an end--just as fiction and life must come to an end.  Time is the enemy of them all.

The setting is significant, as well.  We learn early in the story that Prince Prospero is attempting to escape the pestilence by turning his abbey into a refuge, a place where he and selected subjects of his kingdom can, he thinks, "bid defiance to contagion."  It is a vain hope, however: the Red Death manages to penetrate whatever barriers these humans have tried put between it and themselves.

We can imagine a couple of takeaways--one fairly obvious, one perhaps less so.  The Red Death is, in a word, ineluctable.  Do what you will--indulge your hubris, imagine that you can outsmart it--but it will have its way, just as time and death will have theirs. 

A little knowledge of Poe's life and outlook helps to illuminate another layer of meaning.  As an orphan, an alcoholic, and a Southerner in a literary landscape dominated by Northeasterners such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe felt like an outsider for much of his life.  Even as a teenager attending the University of Virginia, he didn't fit in with the well-to-do scions who surrounded him.  He sometimes imagined revenge on the more fortunate by writing stories such as "Hop-Frog" and "The Cask of Amontillado."  In "The Masque of the Red Death," we can see the guests of Prince Prospero as the chosen few, the ones who secure an exclusive place within the abbey because they have found favor with the prince.  They are literally insiders.  Well, Poe has news for you, chosen ones: the Red Death is going to annihilate you all.  Ha ha!

That sinister laugh is not mine, of course, but Poe's.  I don't mean to suggest that Poe was the kind of twisted murderer he portrayed in "The Tell-Tale Heart."  Contemporary accounts actually describe him as a loving husband and a gentleman--at least when he was sober.  It's clear, though, that this courtly, soft-hearted man was tormented by feelings of being neglected or disrespected.  Fiction is a fairly harmless way of giving voice to these feelings.  As far as we know, he never acted on these feelings to commit violent acts, even if his characters did.  Just such a character is the stranger who crashes Prospero's party, bringing unimaginable destruction with him.

So there you have it: the potential of a deadly and invisible enemy, along with a new awareness of seething outsiders who want to see you and your fellow insiders destroyed in the most hideous way possible.

Enjoy your party!