This document provides an overview and comparison of key elements in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death" and Stephen King's novel "The Shining". It discusses the allegorical themes, settings, times, and secrets/masks in both works, referencing primary texts, secondary sources, and critical theory to support interpretations. The setting in Poe's story is a confined abbey with seven colored rooms representing stages of life. In King's work, the isolated Overlook Hotel is the setting, with dangerous areas like Room 217. Both feature clocks and the stroke of midnight, with Poe directly connecting it to mortality. Both involve masquerade balls and masks, with Poe's ball infiltr

1. Edgar Allan-Poe's 'The Masque of
the Red Death’ and Stephen King's
'The Shining'.

2. Introduction
Throughout the presentation we will be
discussing the main allegorical themes within
Poe’s short story and King’s horror novel
making reference to the primary texts,
secondary sources and critical theory to
support our interpretation.

3. Setting / Poe
POINTS TO COVER
The action of the The Masque of the Red Death takes place in Castellated
Abbey / Abbey is confined.
The Abbey is ‘walled’ with ‘gates of iron’.
7 Coloured rooms.
The rooms run from East to West.
‘Irregularly disposed apartments’
Classic gothic setting.
Religious connotations.

4. Setting / Poe
PRIMARY SOURCES
• 'The deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys' (Paragraph 2, Line 2)
• 'A strong and lofty wall girdled it in/This wall had gates of Iron' (Paragraph 2, Lines
4 And 5)
• 'These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the
prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at
the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue -- and vividly blue were
its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries,
and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were
the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange -- the fifth
with white -- the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely
shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the
walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in
this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the
decorations. The panes here were scarlet -- a deep blood color.' (Paragraph 4)
• 'To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window
looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite'
( Paragraph 4)

5. Setting / Poe
SECONDARY SOURCES
• ‘Many of the buildings or even individual rooms may symbolize
the interiors of human heads’ (Fisher 84: 2002)
• ‘The abbey however , very much resembles the interior of the
human head’ (Fisher 88: 2002)
• ‘This act of confinement that the prince imposes on his
countrymen is the exact opposite of the reaction that the
nineteenth-century society took toward death’ (Santi
99:2012)
•
• ‘It is, of course, designed to repel all potential entrants,
especially the plague itself, although this proves a
predictably futile hope’ (Punter and Byron 260:2004)

6. Setting / King
POINTS TO COVER
The Overlook Hotel located in the mountains.
Deaths/murders
East & West wings; Room 217, Boiler Room, The
Presidential Suite, The ballroom.

7. Setting /King
PRIMARY SOURCES
- The winters are fantastically cruel (14)...cut off from the outside world for 5
to six months (14)corridors that twisted and turned like a maze (72)
Sheer rock faces rose all around them, so high you could barely see their
tops even by craning your neck out the window (49)the bulbs were
masked behind cloudy, cream-hued glass that was bound with
crisscrossing iron strips (71)
- There was a tragedy. A horrible tragedy (14)He killed them, Mr Torrance,
and then committed suicide. He murdered the little girls with a hatchet,
his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way (15)
- dark musty-smelling room (20) chanelled destructive force (20) the hissing
died reluctantly (22)
- red-and-white striped silk wallpaper (72) Great splashes of dried blood,
flecked with tiny bits of greyish-white tissue, clotted the wallpaper (72)
- The elevator, the basement, the playground, Room 217, and the Presidential
Suite...those places were 'unsafe'. Their quarters, the lobby, and the
porch were 'safe'. Apparently the ballroom was too (216)

8. Setting / King
SECONDARY SOURCES
• landscapes could embrace a residual Christianity concerned with
sin and redemption but they could equally be non-didactic,
without any real hierarchy of values, without, indeed a moral
core (Bloom, 2007: 12)The Gothic taste for medievalism gives
way by the middle of the nineteenth century to modern settings,
often middle-class homes or hotels: bedrooms, libraries or
gardens, where the weird is now given free rein. (Bloom,
2007:12)
• King is concerned with American values (Bloom, 2007: 9)his work is
based on social relations and family ties (Bloom, 2007: 9)[King's]
tales are often prolific explorations of small town sensibilities
into which horror is integrated as a plot device (Bloom, 9)ghosts
and demons that appear are reminders, perhaps in general of
man's inhumanity to man, but also more specifically of the
earlier violences which have occurred in the development of
American society and the American psyche (Punter, 2009: 49)

9. Time/Poe
POINTS TO COVER
The signified meaning of the clock.
Clock location.
Midnight.
Mortality.

10. Time/Poe
PRIMARY SOURCES
• It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a
gigantic clock of ebony (Poe, 279)
• and when the minute hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was
to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound
which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical (279)
• And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay
(281)
• And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the
sounding of midnight on the clock....there was an uneasy cessation of
all things as before...before the last echoes of the last chime had
utterly sunk into silence there were many individuals in the crowd who
had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked
figure (280)
• And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death . He came
like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers...and
died each in the despairing posture of his fall. (281)

11. Time/Poe
SECONDARY SOURCES
• [the clock] marks the ravages of time in each of the
seven stages of earthly mortality (Vanderbilt, 1968:
382)Freud understood the death drive as a
biological urge..a force on the threshold between
the organism and the psyche, Lacan has since
reconceptualized as the return of a sense of the
chaotic and ordered Real (Savoy, 2002: 184)
• Poe understood that absence is more unsettling than
presence, particularly when the absent manifests
itself indirectly as uncanny, the psychological,
cultural, or physical otherness just below the
threshold of what is conscious and conventional
(Savoy, 2002: 186)

12. Time/King
POINTS TO COVER
The signified meaning of the clock.
Clock location.
Midnight.
Juxtaposition between 1975 and 1945.

13. Time/King
PRIMARY SOURCES
• ‘In the Overlook all things had a sort of life. It was as if the whole place
was wound up with a silver key. The clock was running. The Clock was
running’ (Chapter 37, Page 334)
• ‘Here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all
times were one’ (Chapter 37, Page 335)
• ‘All the hotel’s eras are together now, all but the current one, the
Torrance era. And this would be together with rest very soon now’
(Chapter 43, Page 377)
• ‘There was a small, racketing series of clicks, and then the clock began to
tinkle Strauss’ ‘Blue Danube Waltz’’ (Chapter 37, Page 333)
• ‘They retreated the way they had come, disappearing just as ‘The Blue
Danube’ finished. The clock began to strike a count of five chimes
(Midnight! Stroke of Midnight!) (Chapter 37, Page 334)
• ‘(And the Red Death held Sway over all)’ Chapter 37, Page 33)
• ‘A moment later and things began to run backward’ (Chapter 37, Page
334)
•

14. Time/King
SECONDARY SOURCES
• ‘Stephen King, for instance, notes three levels, the
most significance being that which calls up
‘terror’ of things unseen but suggested: ‘it is
what the mind sees that makes these stories such
quintessential tales of terror’ (Bloom 155:2004)
• ‘Whether its Danny’s psychic ability or Jacks barely
repressed frustration and rage, or both that wind
up the ‘clockwork mechanism’ of the hotel… is
not completely clear’ (Byron and Punter
249:2004)
•

15. Secrets And Masks/ Poe
POINTS TO COVER
Masquerade ball.
Red Death.

16. Secrets And Masks/ Poe
PRIMARY SOURCES
• ‘Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a
masked ball of the most unusual magnificence’
(Paragraph 3)
• ‘It was voluptuous scene, that masquerade’ (Paragraph
4)
• ‘The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to
feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger
neither wit now propriety existed’ (Paragraph 11)
• ‘The mask which concealed the visage was made so
nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened
corpse’ (Paragraph 11)
•

17. Secrets And Masks/ Poe
SECONDARY SOURCES
• ‘If the ‘red death’ mummers are so terrifying to
them, he is so because they fear realities of
time and death’ (Fisher, 88: 2002)
• ‘For Poe the horror lies in the animation of death
itself. In his imagination and in his hands, the
terror lies in the vitality of death’ (Giddings,
33:1990)
• ‘As in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of The Red
Death, all is ‘phatasmagoric ‘ and fearsomely
distorted’ (Hurley 142: 2007)
•

18. Secrets And Masks/King
POINTS TO COVER
Masquerade Ball, Ballroom.
Scrapbook.
Basement.

19. Secrets And Masks/King
PRIMARY SOURCES
• The Ballroom was empty....But it wasn’t really empty. Because
here in the Overlook things just went on and on. There was an
endless night in August of 1945....a not-yet-light morning in June
some twenty years later...bleeding bodies of three men who
went through their agony endlessly...a woman lolled in her tub
and waited for visitors (217-218)
• And later, at midnight, Derwent himself crying: 'Unmask! Unmask!'
The masks coming off and...(The Red Death held sway over
all!).....the shining glowing Overlook on the invitation....was the
farthest cry from E.A Poe imaginable (115)
• It seemed that before today he had never really understood the
breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was almost like
having a responsibility to history (118)

20. Secrets And Masks/King
SECONDARY SOURCES
• Sigmund Freud has observed, the very point of the
repressed is its eventual return. Gothic literature is
committed to representing that fearful uncanny. The
uncanny, he suggests ''is that class of the terrifying
which leads back to something long known to us,
once very familiar''; it designates the peculiar quality
of something ''that ought to have remained hidden
and secret, and yet comes to light'' (Savoy, 2002:
171)
• The ego altered by such identification becomes an
unquiet grave that harbours the living dead...the
ego seeks to overcome its own fragmentation by
bringing the dead back to life. (Savoy, 2002: 173)

21. Human Vs Nature/ Poe
POINTS TO COVER
The Author.
Disease.
Death.

22. Human Vs Nature/ Poe
PRIMARY SOURCES
• The Red Death had long devastated the
country...blood was its Avatar and its seal ---
the redness and the horror of blood (278)
• This figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded
from head to foot in the habiliments of the
grave. The mask... resemble the
countenance of a stiffened corpse (280)

23. Human Vs Nature/ Poe
SECONDARY SOURCES
• Poe was obsessed with the catatonic condition in
which life imitated death (Giddings, 1990: 47)
• Death appears dramatically like the chief dignitary at a
public ceremony (Giddings, 1990: 48)
• Poe the dweller among the undead and their crypts,
the would be necrophiliac or vampire, the madman,
the drug-taker, the alcoholic, the husband of a child-
bride, the gambler and celebrant of 'the perverse' in
effect none other than his own tormented figure of
Roderick Usher (Giddings, 1990: 46)

24. Human Vs Nature/ King
POINTS TO COVER
The Topiary.
The Wasps Nest.
The ‘Shining’.
The Author.

25. Human Vs Nature/ King
PRIMARY SOURCES
• ‘He was scrambling up the roof as fast as he could,
looking back over his shoulder to see if the wasps
brothers and sisters were rising from the nest he
had uncovered to do battle’ (Chapter 14, Page 113)
• ‘He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into the
Great wasps’ nest of life’ (Chapter 14, Page 119)
• ‘It occurred to him that he didn’t care much for these
hedge animals’ (Chapter 23, Page 223)
• ‘Yes, there was something different. In the topiary’
(Chapter 23, Page 227)
•

26. Human Vs Nature/ King
SECONDARY SOURCES
• ‘The Freudian concept that art is a direct result of a psychological
disturbance’ (Morrison, 192: 1968)
• ‘The strong drive to the symbolic in The Shining is of course founded
precisely on the overwhelming power of those oppositional images
which haunt reader, writer and protagonist’ (Hanson 145:1990)
• ‘According to Freud, one of the most striking and distinguishing features
of the human animal is its extreme and extended dependence on its
parents after birth’ (Hanson 135:1990)
• ‘Much of the power of the text derives from the fact that the images of
death in it, function precisely as images… Kind sees that their power
lies in their ability to evoke our most secret and fundamental terrors’
(Hanson 148:1990)
• ‘One might say that in King’s work two incompatible realms lock: the
realm of moral order, and the other realm of addictive drive – it is
clearly no accident that King himself has suffered from various
addictions in the course of his life’ (Punter 50: 1998)
•

27. Conclusion
In conclusion, both Poe and King use symbolism to explore gothic themes and
ideas. There is a clear influence upon The Shining based on Poe’s The Masque
of the Red Death that make the texts open to critical readings and analysis.
Although there has been a range of varied readings of both texts, it’s a united
agreement that both authors successfully use symbolism and allegory with
purpose to create signified meanings and maintain the gothic genre.

28. Bibliography/ Further Reading
• Bloom, C (2004) ‘Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition’ in A Companion to The Gothic Ed. David
• Punter London: Blackwell Publishing
• Byron, G/ Punter, D (2004) ‘Stephen King, The Shining’ in The Gothic Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
• Byron, G/ Punter, D (2004) ‘The haunted Castle’ in The Gothic Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
• Fisher, B (2002) ‘Poe and the Gothic Tradition’ in The Cambridge Companion To Edgar Allan Poe
• Ed. Kevin J. Hayes Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Giddings, R (1990) ‘Poe: Rituals of Life and Death’ in American Horror Fiction Ed. Brian Docherty
• Hampshire:Palgrave Macmillian
• Hanson, B (1990) ‘Stephen King: Powers of horror’ in American Horror Fiction Ed. Brian Docherty
• Hampshire:Palgrave Macmillian
• Hurley, K (2007) ‘Abject and Grotesque’ in The Routledge Campanion to Gothic Ed. Catherine
• Spooner and Emma McEvoy Oxon:Routledge
• Morrison, C (1968) ‘Joseph Wood Krutch and Edgar Allen Poe’ in Freud and The Critic North
• Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press
• Punter, D (1998) ‘Stephen King’ in The Handbook of The Gothic Ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts
• London:Palgrave Macmillan
• Santi, L (2012) ‘Prince Prospero: The Antithesis of The Beautiful Death’ in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal
• of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 98 – 102 London: Routledge