Day 4: The Pit and the Pendulum
Thoughts: Poe's at his best when he drives the reader into their own delirium and terror through the narrator's frantic, desperate telling. But this one - a classic Poe short story in every collection - gives me a bit of frustration in its unevenness. On one hand, the story itself is brilliant and the horror/suspense device of the pendulum is damn near perfect. On the other hand, he gets saved by...hungry rats? And then a random person's hand reaching in to grab him at the final moment? What? This is like me in 5th grade, once a week in Mrs. McGuire's English class we'd hafta write a short story. I'd start out with a burst of creative fervor, but by paragraph six would tire and quickly wrap things up, wherever it was in the story, with "and then _______ woke up and it was all a dream." The Pit and the Pendulum, with its utter, terrible, pending doom - one set in some semblance of reality, unlike Poe's nonsense fantasy sea vortex tales - deserved a much better ending. But then again, A Tale of Two Cities is one of the greatest books of all time and its entire plot rests entirely on the utter coincidence that two total strangers just happen to look alike, so what the hell do I know?
Memorable Line: "...there rushed to my mind a half formed thought of joy -- of hope. Yet what business had I with hope? It was, as I say, a half formed thought -- man has many such which are never completed. I felt that it was of joy -- of hope; but felt also that it had perished in its formation. In vain I struggled to perfect -- to regain it. Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile -- an idiot."
Score from 1 - 10: 8. Even the ridiculous ending can't totally ruin such a brilliant premise and skillful execution. Kind of the opposite ratio of Jaws, of which 90% was pretty terrible but Benchley's descriptions of the shark ("the fish") noiselessly gliding through the depths were absolutely spellbinding.
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