People have always tried to avoid death, but they cannot. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” the characters are trying to avoid the Red Death, but they fail. Every hour a clock chimes indicating that life is passing by and death is close. People begin to die every minute once the Red Death enters. Poe does a great job with building this suspense with the decisions he makes using the authors craft. In the short story “Masque of the Red Death” Poe uses imagery, setting, and change of surprise to create and effective story. The first way that Poe had used authors craft was with imagery. He had gone into detail about the story where the reader can imagine how something happens. Poe states in the story “The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave” (Poe 87). Poe describes how it looked like when no one could get out of the Abby. At the end of the story Poe describes how the Red Death had effected people. The story states “One by one dropped the rellevers in the blood bedewed halls of their revel, and died in each despairing posture of his fall” (88). This quote is describing how infected people slowly started to drop dead by the infection of the Red Death. Poe also describes how the Red Death had effected people. He states “There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and than profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution” (83). Poe goes into detail to have readers imagine how the characters looked from being