The Masque of the Red Death Decay and the Red Death held dominion over all". Directly influenced by the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto", in "The Masque of the Red Death" Poe adopts many conventions of traditional Gothic fiction, including the castle setting. The multiple single-toned rooms may be representative of the human mind, showing different personality types. The imagery of blood and time throughout also indicates corporeality. The plague may, in fact, represent typical attributes of human life and mortality, which would imply the entire story is an allegory about man's futile attempts to stave off death (a commonly accepted interpretation).
The Murders in the Rue Morgue home in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The mother was found in a yard behind the house, with multiple broken bones and her throat so deeply cut that her head fell off when the body was moved. The daughter was found strangled to death and stuffed upside down into a chimney. The murders occurred in a fourth-floor room that was locked from the inside; on the floor were found a bloody straight razor, several bloody tufts of gray hair, and two bags of gold coins. Several witnesses reported hearing two voices at the time of the murder,