In the Library
The Pit and the Pendulum
Edgar Allan Poe, 1842
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 6k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce
Bierce's condemned man also thinks with fierce clarity at the edge of death, but the stretched-out seconds are bent in a different and crueller way.
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To Build a Fire
Jack London
Like Poe's prisoner, London's traveller reasons coolly against a clock he cannot stop, and the calm of the prose makes the danger worse.
£1.99
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque does the same thing, but swaps one man's cell for a whole abbey, and the dread arrives through colour and a ticking clock.
£1.99
About the book
Total darkness, a cold stone floor, and no way of knowing how large the cell is or what waits at its centre. Condemned by the Inquisition at Toledo, the narrator wakes to this and begins to measure his prison the only way left to him, tearing a strip from his robe and counting his paces along the slimy wall. Then he stumbles, and his face hangs over nothing. Poe builds the whole story from discoveries like that one, each worse than the last: the pit, the drugged sleep, the waking strapped to a wooden frame while a crescent blade swings above his heart , hissing lower with every pass. What makes it unbearable is how clearly the man keeps thinking. He counts the swings, he watches the rats, he reasons against the clock with the cold precision of a mathematician, and that clarity is the true horror, a mind fully awake for its own slow execution. By the end the blade's breath is on your own chest, and the walls have begun to glow.