The Deep Concavity and the Angular Oscillator
Written: May 04 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: truly terrifying, beautiful poetic language
Cons: can be too overwhelming for a child
The Bottom Line: Whether read silently or, for greater effect, read aloud, The Pit and the Pendulum is quite simply the most terrifying tale ever written.
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| quasar's Full Review: Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum |
It was pitch black. Disturbingly so. Utter darkness in the middle of the afternoon isn't natural. Suddenly this voice, hard and deep, invaded my consciousness. Four lines of hissed out Latin followed by:
I WAS sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum.
What followed was a tale of such terror, such absolute horror, I almost couldn't bear listening. Yet at the same time I was enthralled, unable to turn away or block out Basil Rathbone's eerie voice as it detailed the desolation and mental anguish of this unique brand of Inquisition torture.
That such a tale could be filled with unusual somewhat academic sometimes dreamy language only accentuated the evilness described. I lived with our nameless prisoner, breathed with him, felt him. When finally Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum ended and the lights came up, I was drained and somewhat unsure of my surroundings. It took me a moment to realize that I was sitting around a table in the middle of my fourth grade classroom and that I had been listening to an old phonograph record. That it wasn't real.
Why was that recording so powerful? Well certainly the atmosphere - the complete darkness in the middle of the day - helped. But more so, I think that Poe's language is meant to be verbalized. Even his short stories have a flow to them, at times sound like prose poetry or the lyrics to a really long and twisted song. Try reading it out loud. Like a poem there are natural ebbs and flows in the language, breaks that accentuate the sense of impending death, heighten the anticipation. The story may end with a discordant hum of human voices and a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders but there is nothing dissonant or stridently grinding about the tale itself.
That wasn't my first experience with The Pit and the Pendulum. No, I had read it before. I was a big Poe fan, although I preferred his poetry to his short stories. I still do, actually. The Pit and the Pendulum is enthralling reading without any theatrics. But with the added atmosphere it takes on a different quality altogether; that experience in the classroom that day almost 20 years ago still shapes the way I think about this, my favorite Poe story.
Spoilers Tread Close Upon this Admonition
Quite simply, The Pit and the Pendulum is the story of one nameless man's treatment at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. It concetrates on the reactions of this man to his imprisonment and how the mind reacts to extreme stress. Trapped in a world of hallucinations and darkness, unseen dangers and careful monitoring, the puppet masters above drug him and keep him unaware of his true surroundings. When he almost falls into a pit in his cell, it is the fear of the unknown - not knowing how deep or what foul smelling liquid lies below - that terrifies much more than any possible harm.
Suddenly some awareness is granted, only to lead to a slow understanding that death will come from a slowly dropping pendulum knife. This anticipation and knowledge are key to the torture - he has to watch the pendulum fall slowly, inch by inch. When he sleeps the pendulum sleeps too. It is the keen understanding of what is to come, the realization that he cannot stop it, the ever-so-slow unfolding of the inevitable that is the most excrutiating torment.
But then the unexpected - the pendulum tore through the bonds holding him underneath its ominous sway. A moment of hope, a stray thought that perhaps something was going his way poked through. Then comes the realization that the pendulum still swung, forcing him ever closer to the dreaded pit. From dizzying heights back to the lowest of the lows - the pit of dispair. As our hero finally succumbs into the pit, he is rescued.
This is not a tale for the faint of heart.
Recommended:
Yes
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