The Masque of the Red Death
A Personal Tribute to My Favorite Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe
I had a Modern Library Giant collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works when I was young.
My dad bought it for me when I was in sixth or seventh grade.
The pages of that book were delicate and thin. The print was small. The book was old. My dad bought it in 1988 or 1989, but the print date on it was much older than that. The Internet tells me that edition’s first printing was in 1938. I don’t know if the edition I had was a first printing, but I do know, because I can remember its smell, that the book was old.
I didn’t realize I was a budding books antiquarian when I was in middle school, but I was. The Poe collection sat on the shelf next to the Voltaire collection, books my dad purchased at the same store on the same day: Poe for me, Voltaire for my brother, and yes most people might think it’s a little odd for a dad to buy the works of Poe and Voltaire for middle schoolers, but I’ve gotten to know enough of you who follow me on Facebook and Medium to know that many of you had similar experiences in childhood.
And many of you, like me, feel grateful as hell for the adult who got you excited about challenging literature when you were young.
I thought about my copy of Poe’s complete works when I began to read The Masque of the Red Death, the Poe story that I loved most as a teen.
I loved it because I thought it was wonderfully terrifying.
“Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.”
The Masque of the Red Death is about a Prince and other nobles who have successfully avoided a plague that is terrorizing the land, and now are holding a masquerade ball in his palace. The plague, known as The Red Death, is a gruesome affair that leaves those infected with it dead in a pool of their own blood.
The Masque of the Red Death is rightly viewed as one of Poe’s most haunting works, and to me it was exactly that when I first read it. At age 11 or 12, when you read a scary story, there’s something marvelous about how truly terrified you can become. You’re old enough to read and decipher the dense tangles of thought that appear in challenging books, but young enough that your imagination can still overpower your sense of reality.
The more I write this post, the more grateful I feel that I got to read these stories when I was a kid.
Of course, nostalgia and gratitude is not what Poe wants you to feel when you read The Masque of the Red Death but that’s the trick with literature, isn’t it? Some of it is what the text brings to you; some of it is what you bring to the text.
If I’m making you feel warm and fuzzy about The Masque of the Red Death I assure you that feeling will change the minute you start reading the story. In many ways it is Poe’s most demented tale. The first paragraph alone, with its graphic descriptions of how a plague makes its victims die, is a gruesome read.
And also an enticing, wonderfully scandalous read when you’re an 11-year-old Catholic school kid in the 80s.
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. 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.
If you took off the dust cover on my Modern Library Giant collection of Poe, the hardback underneath was bright red, like the “scarlet stains upon the body and face of the victim” in Poe’s vision of the Red Death. To a middle schooler who was both terrified and fascinated with this story, that bright red cover gave the book an aura unlike anything else on my bookshelf.
Twenty-some years after I first read Masque of the Red Death, I wrote a horror novel that’s set at a masquerade ball. That novel was my one and only “hit” as a writer (so far), but one is enough to change your life, and until today I’ve never really acknowledged for myself how large The Masque of the Red Death looms in my personal literary pantheon. This is a story that settled so deeply into my brain it’s been a part of my identity for decades now, and I didn’t really understand that until I re-read it as an adult.
It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
At the masquerade ball in Poe’s story, one of the guests is a phantom, a masked mysterious figure of death who brings death into the ball, killing the Prince in an instant, only to disappear in a heap of empty clothes when the other party-goers try to kill it.
Then the other party-goers die as well. Everyone dies. It’s an absolutely bonkers story. The most carnage Poe ever wrote. Completely horrifying in the best possible way, with a killer final paragraph that suggests global apocalypse:
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
