The Pit and the Pendulum

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"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe and a work of horror fiction. It was first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, and is set very loosely during the Peninsular War between Spain and Napoleonic France (1808–1814), although it invokes the feared Inquisition of earlier centuries. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story inspires fear in the reader via its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing the inescapable reality of the coming doom. In this, it is unlike Poe's stories which invoke the supernatural. The tale has been adapted to film several times.

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