As I’ve been rereading The Shining (1977), I’ve been paying particularly close attention to the architectural notes and layout descriptions of the hotel, including the complex intersections and departures between the details of King’s novel, the real-life Stanley Hotel, and the film adaptations. However, as I considered the spatial significance of place and the Overlook in The Shining, I also found myself simultaneously thinking through the ways in which King’s epigraph from and repeated references to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” establish their own set of spatial considerations and parallels. 

King includes a lengthy epigraph from “The Masque of the Red Death” in the opening pages of The Shining, with a particular focus on the “gigantic clock of ebony” and the eerie silence that falls through the rooms each time the clock chimes the hour. There are definitely some pronounced parallels between “The Masque of the Red Death” and The Shining, including the clock on the mantelpiece in the Overlook Hotel’s ballroom, the significance of the clock chiming midnight, and the ghostly revelers’ cries to “unmask!” Considering the story’s larger themes, the isolation of Prince Prospero’s party from the larger world also parallels the Torrances’ isolation in the Overlook, particularly as winter comes and there is no way for them to escape. Finally, this isolation is internal as well as external, with both Prospero’s guests and Jack Torrance turning inward, descending further into the darkness of their own unsettled minds as the party goes on. 

Several artists have developed their own maps and layouts of Prospero’s castle, including a role-playing map and a Minecraft version of these chambers. As the revelers pass from room to room, the light and shadows play upon each space, with each chamber having a single defining color. These rooms can only be experienced in disconnected fragments, with Poe writing “The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect.” The role-playing map emphasizes this separation, with sharply turning corridors connecting each of the chambers. The Minecraft recreation of Prospero’s rooms is more cohesive, without these separating hallways, though the sharp corners and clear demarcations between the rooms evoke this same experience of spatial isolation and fragmentation. 

The labyrinthine halls of the Overlook Hotel at times invite this same experience, as Wendy and Danny (often reluctantly) explore to figure out which spaces are safe and which are dangerous. Jack’s experience of the Overlook is more seductive: it is similarly labyrinthine, but in leading Jack down these halls, through the piles of archival material in the basement, and further into the hotel’s dark history, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to retrace his steps in order to return to reality or to his own best self. 

Another interesting visual interpretation and mapping of Poe’s story is in the game board of IDW Games’ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, with art by Gris Grimly and game design by Adam Wyse. Here the layout of Prospero’s chambers follows a circular design, mirroring the face of the ebony clock that tolls each hour. There are still clear demarcations between the rooms, with doors situated at each room’s outermost edge that would make it difficult for characters to get a clear look inside before they cross the threshold. However, the circular design creates a more cohesive and connected spatial experience. The boundaries between spaces are much blurrier in this navigable version of “The Masque of the Red Death,” and while this board does not have the same stark fragmentation of other versions, there is something unsettling about the ease and fluidity with which characters can be drawn from one space into the next, perhaps not realizing their peril until it is too late to turn back (arguably similar to Jack’s experience of the Overlook) or finding themselves in an utterly indefensible position. This design also invites both a spatial and psychological immersion: there is no clear entrance or exit, making the space circuitous and inescapable, even after the clock has struck midnight. 

One of the innovative features of the IDW Games’ interpretation of “The Masque of the Red Death” is that the tale continues after midnight. As the game’s rulebook explains the objective, “As nobles, you will spend the evening going from room to room gaining popularity, but don’t neglect the latest gossip and rumors you all bring throughout the ball. Before midnight strikes, each noble must plan out six movements to make after midnight” (2). While Poe ends his iconic story with the sudden death of Prince Prospero and his guests and the pronouncement that “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,” in this game, the characters have at least a fighting chance to survive after the Red Death appears. Reputation, popularity, and winning the favor of the Prince are central to each character’s survival, in addition to quick thinking and strategic navigation to avoid ending up in the same room as the Red Death in the ten-minute increments between 12:00 and 1:00. 

While Prospero’s guests in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” have nothing more to fear after the clock strikes midnight, there is plenty of horror that remains both within and beyond the halls of the Overlook Hotel. Jack has been taken by the hotel and the Overlook itself has gone up in flames, but Danny, Wendy, and Dick have to carry the trauma of those horrors with them out into the real world and an uncertain future, and as we see in Doctor Sleep, King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining, even fire can’t completely destroy the Overlook’s dark power. 

[Quotes from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” are from the electronic version provided by the Poe Museum at https://poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death/]