The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe ★ ★ ★ Worth reading!

BOOK REVIEW 
[No Spoilers]
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★ ★ ★ Worth reading!
The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe
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Poe was the master of exploring, dissecting, and delving into the inevitability of death and all the emotions surrounding that. This story dripped with a sense of dread from the first line and lasted until the very end. The first-person narrator placed the reader right into the chaos of the moment, which felt authentic and also disorienting, which always makes for great suspense.
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The Pit and the Pendulum begins when the narrator is sentenced to death during the Catholic Inquisition and either due to fear or panic sways in and out of a state of confusion and clarity. The narrator wakes up with a sense of dread, realizing that he’s been sentenced to death, but unaware of what happened next. Is he trapped in a cell, is he already in his grave, or is he already dead? The reader must figure it out right alongside the main character. 
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The setting that Poe has created is a haunting nightmare of suspense and fear. A deep endless pit makes death seem so inevitable, while the paintings depicting time and the pendulum, really brings to life the fact that each second brings us closer to death. Like several of Poe’s short stories, the fear of death itself seems to be the driving force behind the character’s actions and can even be more sinister than the terrible circumstances that they’re in. 
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Overall, I enjoyed the concept of the story and the sense of doom that was created with the threat of death and the taunting pendulum and pit. However, the first-person narration and the amount of time the character spends feeling disoriented made it somewhat difficult to follow. You definitely need concentration to make it through and to decipher the narrator’s confusion to get to the events of the story. 
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Click here to purchase The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe
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Demon eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand directions, where none had been visible before, and gleamed with the lurid luster of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal.”
​- Edgar Allan Poe

Free!—I had but escaped death in one form of agony, to be delivered unto worse than death in some other.” - Edgar Allan Poe

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