by Edgar Allen Poe

This story is classic Poe and fairly well known, but I'll try to avoid spoilers anyway. It's about a man who has endured constant insults by a man named Fortunado. The Horror aspect is the coldness within which he plans a premeditated murder out of revenge.

The two men are ostensibly friends and Fortunado is invited to enjoy a special wine, Amontillado, secretly in the dark cellar that serves as both wine cellar and catacomb. What could go wrong?

In a way I was disappointed by the lack of emotion put into the latter part of the story. I knew it from a song written by the Alan Parsons Project by the same title. If you're read the story but not heard the song, I strongly recommend going to YouTube to have a listen. It captured the despair of the victim in a haunting manner that was actually missing from the written story.

There is no supernatural aspect to this particular Poe story. It is pure human cruelty to his own species. If torture and torment are your thing, Poe can always be trusted to deliver.

These are some of the first works I read in horror and mystery, and ones that still stand out for me.

Changed my mind (yet again) and switched books for my final bingo square, as I'm not sure I'll be in much of a mind to finish my previous choice for "Grave or Graveyard," Umberto Eco's Cemetery of Prague.

So I switched to the 2016 BBC audio adaptation of Dracula, starring David Suchet in the title role and Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Harker; combined for good measure with Edgar Allan Poe's Cask of Amontillado: Dracula for the crucial Whitby graveyard scenes (and the fact that Whitby Abbey actually inspired the whole novel, which has drawn the goth scene to the town, which in turn has given rise to plans for a mock Whitby graveyard so as to restore some respect to the real place); and The Cask of Amontillado for the fact that ... well, one ironically-named Fortunato does end up in a grave of a very particular sort at the end of the kind of story only Poe could have come up with.

The Dracula adaptation is an abridged one; David Suchet makes for a great Dracula, but not all of the book's profoundly somber atmosphere translates well here – I couldn't help being reminded of some of the camp movie additions of yesteryear.

Poe's Cask of Amontillado OTOH is one of my favorite short stories (by Poe, as well as overall); it's a concise, perfectly-executed piece of mounting tension and dread, laced with irony and merciless resolve.

Anyway, so that concludes my bingo reads – wrap-up post coming separately.  Thanks to Moonlight Murder and Obsidian Blue ... I've had a blast!

Whitby Abbey and Graveyard (photos mine)