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Book Review 3+ of 5 stars to The Pit and the Pendulum, a short story written in 1842, by Edgar Allan Poe. As in the tradition of Poe's other Gothic and gory tales, this one takes the fear of death to new heights. Poe tells the story of a man facing punishment during the Spanish Inquisition, a death like no other. At first, he's strapped to a wooden table while a pendulum swings from above with a saw, getting lower and lower until it's nearly about to start ripping into his flesh. But
What makes this one a bit more hair-raising is its radical two-point climax curve. The guy nearly dies at the pit, then nearly dies at the pendulum. SAT words galore as well as the best known anecdote of death at the Inquisition, at least for me, makes it easily an essential read. Just for horror writers: Here's a wealth of adjectives & verbs that describe dread & the absolute horror of an impending death!
Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!At least not as late as in the Napoleonic Wars, when it was technically still operating – until Napoleon put a stop to it – but when it would be highly improbable that so much pain would have been taken by the Dominicans to inflict so much pain on one prisoner, especially when nobody was there to witness the plight. Nevertheless, these were thoughts that hardly occurred to me when I read Poe’s tale The Pit and the Pendulum for the first time. I must have be...
Apart from The Tell-Tale Heart that I read for class in junior high; this was the first Poe that I ever really read.....and I was immediately in love! His language was the most beautiful that I had ever come across. I was so entranced by the way he used words that the horrific depiction wasn't quite coming through as I sat there fascinated with the way he could string words into a sentence like pearls onto a chain. But then, I began to get queazy, forgetting to take a breath....it was a beautifu...
"To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me."Really good, suspenseful little story, told with Poe's deft touch of the macabre. Unlike most of Poe's other stories, though, this on...
I love the poems and books of Poe. So atmospheric, compelling and unique
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan PoeThe story was remarkably suspenseful and chilling. It's a story about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition. Because of the atmosphere, it inspired fear in the reader's mind. Notwithstanding a little book, it's long enough to be carried away to the gloomy, extreme dark, and horrifying dungeon. I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things. Da...
At age twelve I was given my first introduction to the world of literature by my mother who read me Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. I can still vividly recollect living through the horrors of the chamber with the unnamed narrator, wondering why Christian monks would construct such a room and why Christian monks would inflict such torture. I still wrestle with a number of the story’s themes.SADISMWhy do such a thing? The story’s torture chamber is not a makeshift construction slapped together; ra...
Putting aside the histhoric context of the tale that is a accesory frame for the picture,the narration, we pass to review.The tale is one of the greatest romantic horror tales,told in first person by a condemned to death by the Toledo Inquisition, with the great prose of Poe.Is a tale about subjetive pass of time,about the subjetive terrorific reality in a sensorial deprived situation,a nightmarish voyage to the unknown next torture, and told in a sort of conscious stream of hopeles fear and ter...
4/5"...I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain i...
