Although "The Pit and the Pendulum" focuses on a single character, the reader actually discovers very little about him. One does not know his name, what he has done, whether he is guilty, whether he is a criminal, what he misses about life in the everyday world, whether he loves someone — in short, the reader knows none of those things about the character that one might expect to learn if this were a novel in which a man spends several years in prison. In fact, all that is known is that he faces the horrors of mental and physical torture and then inevitable death.

Although such a lack of knowledge in a novel might lead to the loss of the reader's interest, Poe provides all that is necessary to become engaged with this intense story. For this is not a realistic portrayal of an individual caught in...