![]() ![]() ![]() And, as is completely understandable, I began with the first story, the eponymous “The Oblivion Room.”Īnd suddenly, it seemed as if I were in the world of “The Pit and the Pendulum” again…for the first time. Until I was asked to review Christopher Conlon’s impressive collection, The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation.Īs is my wont with a new book, I took it with me to a nearby fast-food restaurant, where I could enjoy it in the relative silence (mostly silence from my internal noises). I’ve re-read most many times over the course of the intervening fifty years or so, but I still vividly remember my essentially visceral reaction to my first encounter with several of them: the fantastic gorgeousness of “The Masque of the Red Death,” which I recently cribbed from (only slightly) for a Lovecraftian novella the calm, rational madness of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” and-perhaps most dramatically of all-the smothering darkness and ultimate meaninglessness, as it seemed to me, of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Over the years I have not encountered a story that touched me, that horrified me, in quite the same way as that one did. I discovered the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe quite early in my teens and read them voraciously. ![]()
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