OCTOBERFEAST – The Masque of the Red Death

[OCTOBERFEAST is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as Satan’s Snacktime]

Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps the most celebrated madman in all of American literature. When he wasn’t drinking himself into a stupor or bedding his thirteen year old cousin-bride or snorting blow off of cadaver asses, Poe spent his time setting the precedents for what would become the modern horror genre. Oh, and he also invented the detective story.

It was a pretty solid life for a guy whose last days on Earth consisted of being found wandering Baltimore in someone else’s clothes while crying out for some mystery figure named “Reynolds.” Perhaps if this Reynolds had revealed himself, Poe wouldn’t have collapsed into a death-coma. But then again, perhaps the legend of Poe wouldn’t be quite so epic without a hazy opium-cloud of a demise.

Of all his works, The Masque of the Red Death may be Poe’s most explicit acknowledgment that his reckless ways would lead to a tragic demise.

The 1842 short story opens with a harrowing account of the Red Death, the newest disease to rage across the countryside. As described by Poe, the Red Death ain’t no bullshit chickenpox or swine-flu, but is essentially a naturally-occurring biological weapon.

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avator and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

Goddamn. Makes Motaba look like a two-for-one matinee of Never Say Never.

Enter Prince Prospero, the local royal who must confront the Red Death as he sees fit. Does Prospero task his wizards and medicine men with the responsibility of finding a cure? Or does he send scouts to scour the countryside in hopes of finding survivors? Or does he appeal to God in the hoping of receiving an answer through Providence?

No. And no. And no.

Instead, Prince Prospero does what any royal-asshole does – he seals off his castellated abbey, allowing neither ingress nor egress. Then, while a decent human might try to wait out a pestilence in somber tranquility, the motherfucker throws a goddamn party. That’s right, there are human beings just outside of his dominion that are dropping dead after bleeding out of their faces, and this guy is throwing a ripper.

Not just any ripper, mind you. Whereas a humbler prince may have settled for a six-foot sub and a keg of Molson Canadian, Prospero sets his shit up like something out of Eyes Wide Shut!

There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm – much of what has been since seen in “Hernani.” There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.

So what happens, you ask? Well, of course the party is crashed by a bad motherfucker who looks like the embodiment of the Red Death. After making his way through the first six colored chambers of the imperial suite, the party-crasher enters the seventh, which had remained untenanted all evening. Yeah, something about the fact that it was bathed in blood-red light and shrouded in black velvet tapestries. Weird.

In any case, Prospero’s pissed that this dude is freaking everyone out, so he and his crew try to stab him to death. Of course, their efforts are futile as this newcomer totally goes Obi-Wan:

It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry – and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And then, everyone dies. The end!

Edgar Allan Poe lived a life of tragedy – parents dead before he was three, cousin-bride dead at the age of twenty-four after a four-year illness, years of addiction – and it was reflected in his writing. As a writer routinely addressing the shedding of mortal coils, Poe surely had to have considered his own death. The Masque of the Red Death is Poe’s way of contemplating his own inevitable death, perhaps even casting himself as the prince. Prospero tried to ward off death by throwing bizarre parties, and Poe (Prospero) wrote bizarre stories, but both men succumbed to the only guarantee in life.

Death.

ALL HAIL THE RED DEATH!

[Full text of The Masque of the Red Death]