“The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.”
Thus begins “The Masque of the Red Death,” written in 1842 by Edgar Allen Poe. It’s the story of a Prince who throws a masked ball in his walled abbey during a plague, with the intention of cheating death. Needless to say … well, I needn’t tell you how it turns out. It’s plutocrat hubris, and it’s Poe.
Inspired by Poe’s story, Cory Doctorow wrote a novella also called “The Masque of the Red Death,” as a tribute to Poe, and which can be found in his book “Radicalized.” In it, a plutocrat brings his pals to his luxury bunker during civilization’s collapse, expecting to emerge once the unpleasantness has passed and others have rebuilt.
Naturally it doesn’t work out for them. They learn the hard way that humanity has a shared microbial destiny, and that you can’t shoot germs. Every catastrophe must be answered with solidarity, not selfishness, if it is to be survived.
Here’s the free Macmillan Audio edition of Masque of the Red Death, from Doctorow’s website, read by the Stefan Rudnicki.