Have you ever tried to ride out a plague by welding yourself and 1,000 of your closest friends in a psychedelic castle for some depravity and debauchery? Only to have some ASSHOLE decide to show up to the party dressed as the plague? Except it turns out it’s not some asshole but the actual plague, and then all of you bleed out at once? It’s Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) on the podcast today, and we’re talking symbols, aristocracy, and psychoanalysis. And, you know, more plague.
We read the version in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842, edited by Thomas O. Mabbott. For a comprehensive Poe biography, see Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance.
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