1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

  • Gulliver's Travels
  • Roxana
  • Moll Flanders
  • Love In Excess
  • Robinson Crusoe
  • A Tale of a Tub
  • Oroonoko
  • The Princess of Cleves

Thursday, October 25, 2012

92. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe piles one horror on top of another:  the trial, the conviction, the descent into the pit, exploring the pit in complete darkness, the well in the centre of the pit, being bound to a frame below the descending pendulum, the rats, escape from the pendulum, the heating metal, walls closing ....  and then a last minute rescue.

I imagine Poe watching the swing of a clock's pendulum in an opiate haze.

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