The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year and is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him.
In "The Masque of the Red Death" Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors – of the deadly approach of a terrible pendulum…
"The Raven" is a narrative poem. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness.