A prince seals a thousand friends in an abbey to escape the Red Death, and holds a masked ball in seven colored rooms with a black clock at the end.
A story of about twenty-four hundred words that you can read in ten minutes, built around one floor plan: seven rooms in a winding line, a black room at the end and a clock that stops the party every hour. It is atmospheric and non-graphic on the page, though it is about a deadly plague. Four and a half out of five (my opinion).
Every guide comes as a video and a full written article. Pick the one you need: the review is spoiler-free, the ending explained is not.
A full-spoiler Masque of the Red Death summary that walks the seven rooms in order: their colors, the black room and its ebony clock, the midnight stranger, the ending, and word counts from the text. Project Gutenberg text, counted by us.
This is the full text of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death (1842), read aloud word for word in about 15 minutes. The video highlights each word as it is spoken, so you can follow the original wording, and…
The Masque of the Red Death is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. A plague called the Red Death is killing a country, and Prince Prospero seals a thousand friends inside an abbey. We read it in Project Gutenberg ebook 2148, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 (the Raven Edition), where it is one short story among many. Paragraph numbers on this site count every block of text, including single lines of dialogue, and give fourteen.
Below you’ll find a walk through the story in order, with the seven rooms and their colors, the clock and its chimes, the midnight stranger and the ending, plus counts made from the text. The page has full spoilers, since the whole story is covered.
A story of about twenty-four hundred words that you can read in ten minutes, built around one floor plan: seven rooms in a winding line, a black room at the end and a clock that stops the party every hour. It is atmospheric and non-graphic on the page, though it is about a deadly plague. Four and a half out of five (my opinion). Read it if: you want a classic you can finish in one sitting; you like gothic atmosphere and symbolism; you are studying it and want the rooms, clock and ending laid out in order; you want a story that is short but stays with you. Skip it if: you want characters with detailed backstories; you dislike stories about death and plague; you want a long, slow read.
A full-spoiler Masque of the Red Death summary that walks the seven rooms in order: their colors, the black room and its ebony clock, the midnight stranger, the ending, and word counts from the text. Project Gutenberg text, counted by us. Summary: The Masque of the Red Death →
A plague called the Red Death is killing the country, so Prince Prospero seals a thousand friends inside an abbey. In the fifth or sixth month he holds a masked ball in a suite of seven colored rooms. At midnight a tall figure dressed as the Red Death walks through the rooms, Prospero chases him with a dagger and falls dead in the black room, and the revelers find nothing inside the costume. They then die one by one.
From the eastern end to the western end: blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black. The first six have windows in the same color as the room. The seventh is hung in black velvet and has scarlet panes, a deep blood color, so its windows are the only ones that do not match.
It stands against the western wall of the black room. Each hour it strikes a note so deep and strange that the musicians stop, the waltzers stop and the giddiest guests turn pale, until laughter returns. At midnight it strikes twelve, and the story says more thought crept into the guests' minds before they noticed the masked stranger.
The story says he is dressed as the Red Death, in grave clothes, a corpse-like mask and blood. When the guests seize him in the black room they find the costume holds no body, and the story says the presence of the Red Death is then acknowledged. In our reading the figure is the plague itself, but that is an interpretation.
He rushes through the six rooms with a drawn dagger, gets within three or four feet of the figure, and the figure turns at the far end of the black room. There is a sharp cry, the dagger drops on the carpet and Prospero falls dead. The story shows nothing more graphic than that.
Project Gutenberg ebook 2148, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2, the Raven Edition. The story is one short piece of that volume, about twenty-four hundred words. We split it into fourteen blocks of text, counting each block, including single lines of dialogue, as a paragraph, and all counts on this page are ours.
