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In his roles as magazine editor and book reviewer, Poe was acutely aware of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Founded in 1817, Blackwood’s supplied some of the age’s most innovative writing and became a significant vehicle for the circulation of short prose fiction in the early nineteenth century. Blackwood’s also contributed to promoting a popular type of the Gothic known as the Tale of Sensation, in which a victim minutely describes his physical sensations while trapped in some excruciating predicament. As a commercial writer keenly conscious of the dominant trend of the period, Poe eagerly imitated, parodied, and reworked popular Blackwood’s tales throughout his career. Poe’s terror tales were clearly designed to cater to an American public increasingly hungry for horror and sensation. In this study I intend to examine Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” in relation to the Blackwood’s context. Poe brilliantly combined and reframed several distinctive Blackwood’s elements to create a complex psychological terror tale. Poe’s maneuver of his narrative subjects has a different, more intensive quality than Blackwood’s. Although he draws upon popular Blackwood’s themes with minute accounts of sensational experiences, Poe surpasses the machinery of Blackwood’s in its exploration of the psychology of fear.