Recommendation of the Month: The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

“Yet, for a wild moment, did my spirit refuse to comprehend the meaning of what I saw. At length it forced— it wrestled its way into my soul—it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason. —Oh! For a voice to speak!—oh! Horror!—oh! Any horror but this!”

Needless to say, Edgar Allan Poe excelled in bringing forth from the depths of his unique imagination the most fascinating tales of horror and suspense. His prodigious pen had the power to instill enough life and vigor into its creations to keep any reader appalled and yet mesmerized until the very last word.

 

One of his true masterpieces is The Pit and the Pendulum, the story of a man condemned to perish by the merciless hands of the inquisition.

 

While barely able to recall the events leading to his most unfortunate destiny, he suddenly wakes up in the midst of a gulf of darkness, yet incapable of understanding the fiendish device his torturers might have concocted to carry out his sentence.

 

After a short while he finally realizes that death is not the worst fate that can befall a human being, but it´s the inquisition´s dungeons and lethal devices that embody a whole new sense of the horrifying.   

 

This particular story might not possess to its highest degree the unmistakably poetical prose that makes the reading of Poe´s works a unique experience. Nevertheless, The Pit and the Pendulum carries within an extraordinary force capable of taking complete control of the senses, leaving you amazed and dazzled much time after its denouement. An utterly engrossing story you will definitely want to read over and over again.