The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allen Poe (1843)

 

The Pit and the Pendulum

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is another short story from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories I got. It is very short indeed, barely 20 pages and covers hardly more than a single scene, but what a scene it is.

The narrator is a prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition who wakes up in a dark cell. He has evidently sustained some sort of torture because even the simple act of gathering his senses is an ordeal. As he slowly comes to, he tries to orient himself, but collapses in the process.

When he wakes up, he realizes the cell is smaller than anticipated, but taller and at the centre of the cell there is a bottomless pit. This pit seems to be the only way out, but our narrator shrinks back from this place as a certain death sentence. Some food has been set out for him, and this has clearly been laced with a sedative because when he wakes up again, he is tied to a pallet. Only his one arm is free enough to reach some food and drink. Eventually he notices a pendulum swinging high above him. The bottom edge of is a razor-sharp blade. His sense of panic increases when he also notices that the pendulum is slowly descending. Over the next few pages, we follow this increase in panic until it reaches a crescendo when the swinging blade is low enough to cut him. Basically, his cell only holds two exits, both through death: the pit or the pendulum.

This is a very short story, but by sticking to describing the developing stages of the narrator’s panic and fear we get plenty of that. By using the first-person form, it is not just him, but us who are feeling the torture and the sense of impending death and doom. The helplessness and the inevitability are the worst of it. There is nothing he can do but wait and anticipate his own destruction. They say that in the last seconds before your death, your life passes before your eyes in summary, but not in this story. It is blind, white, all-consuming fear, you experience.

As I mentioned in my review of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe did not invent the gothic genre, but he shaped it into the form that we recognize. This is also true of “The Pit and the Pendulum”. It is a window into horror literature at least a century before this became a really big thing. Modern horror uses many of the same effects and these can also be found in the other short stories of the book. Not all are as good, but they all contain that eerie, weird feeling that something is not right.

I am not myself a fan of the horror genre, but I recognize the quality of these short stories and for fans of the genre I am certain this is essential reading. It is certainly easily accomplished.