Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Masque of the Red Death, depicts Prince Prospero and his noble friends’ useless attempt to avoid a plague, known as the Red Death. Poe’s vivid imagery sets an overwhelmingly elegant scene in Prospero’s bizarre abbey. Within the final paragraphs, the prince’s paradise abruptly collapses with the arrival of a stranger, masquerading as a corpse- the guise of the Red Death. Poe opens his tale with a brief, yet graphic account of the plague’s victims, who die of “profuse bleeding at the pores” and a violent seizure. In the midst of the Red Death, Prince Prospero’s haven, a strange abbey, is described by Poe in great detail, using cumulative sentences and an abundance of adjectives. The “voluptuous