Horror or Gothic Fiction; Literary Fiction; Quest; Tragedy
You don’t need us to tell you “The Cask” is Horror or Gothic – the whole story is about two guys walking through a vast underground graveyard, in the middle of the night, getting drunker and drunker. And somebody is getting walled in a hole. That scares us.
But what scares us in Poe is what makes “The Cask” Literary Fiction as well. Poe doesn’t show us the violence in the story; there is no blood and no guts or gore – it’s all in the psychology. “The Cask” presents a bizarre psychological study of two creepy men.
Both men are on a quest. Fortunato wants the Amontillado, and Montresor wants Fortunato to feel his revenge. And where there is revenge, there is usually tragedy – meaning somebody dies in the end.