“The Pit and the Pendulum” is famous for its excruciatingly vivid description of pure dread. Almost nothing actually happens to the narrator in this dungeon—it almost happens, and that’s precisely where the horror lies.

The worst thing in the world, Poe suggests, isn’t to die, but to fear death and the suffering that might attend death. Or perhaps more subtly, it’s to fear that fear, to experience fear feeding on itself. The narrator of this story makes it clear that fear is utterly absorbing, destabilizing, and even dehumanizing. It can undo a person to the extent that they long for death. If that’s true, one hardly needs an Inquisitorial dungeon to go through some of the world’s worst tortures: One’s own mind can do the job perfectly well on its own.

It’s possible to read this entire story as a kind of dream-vision. The long passage about dreams and unconsciousness early on in the story makes poetic and even optimistic claims for the unconscious, arguing that a close connection with the unconscious mind is the precursor of art, and the purview of only a chosen few.

But in the rest of the story, the ability to see those mid-air visions comes at a tremendous cost.