I read this story when I was 16. It's probably my favorite EAP work of them all. Power and money isn't enough to save you from your mortality. It will always be relevant.
The feeling of unease is what makes all horror like these stand the test of time. Knowing our time is short and can come at any interval in our lives is what feeling alive is.
I didn't realize at first, but I could tell it was Poe when the intro was done. As a writer by hobby myself, I'm still left in awe at how seamlessly Poe moves through his prose. It's also terrifyingly efficient. Not a single line is wasted. And somehow, even when describing a moment of pause and silence, he doesn't say it. Yet you can feel it. And yet he continues on relentlessly, as if gripping you by the throat, and never letting you go until the end of the story. And even then, leaving you with more questions than you started with. It wasn't a secret, but I'm reminded of what the penmanship of a true master is like.
Of all of Poe’s macabre short stories, THIS ONE is my absolute favorite. For all those people in the audience who LOVE Edgar Allen Poe, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND you to watch a movie called “Extraordinary Tales”. It’s an animated film that retells some of Poe’s great short stories including “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valvadar”, “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, and “The Pit and The Pendulum”!
My high school theater class theorized that the Mask of the Red Death was the personification of Tuberculosis. Many people in Poe's life died from it. In the play, partygoers cough violently as they die and with tuberculosis, you cough up blood: blood being another signifier of why the Mask of the Red Death might specifically be red.
I must not lie, but this video alone taught me a lot of new words.
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He's great with storytelling.
Death claims us all equally.