Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is widely regarded by many literary critics as one of his most accessible and easy to understand works. Although these attributes could lead some to think that this would make a short story simple or below them. The Masque has stood the test of time due, in part, to Poe’s genius ability as a story teller but also because it is not like other similar stories. The main thing that I noticed that set this story apart is Poe’s expert use of scene and setting, especially how he used color to convey meaning and feelings that would otherwise be impossible to put on a page. His use of color through this short story is what I will focus this paper on. Edgar Allan Poe’s use of color to illuminate the terrifying scenes in “The Masque of the Red Death” is seen throughout the short story from the first sentence to the very last. There is an entire paragraph dedicated to going in to extreme detail of each room that the party will be held in, the description of the rooms is painstakingly accurate down the last detail, “The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue.” When color is brought into the writing it makes each room much more personal and makes it so that the reader can almost see the rooms, almost picture themselves standing in one of them amongst the guests at the party. The colors bring us even further into the terror that Poe is trying convey, but that is not all that they are there for. Imagining a room totally styled with one color, and lit with a lamp of the same color can make the reader feel something that words otherwise would not be able to. The symbolism of the colors does not start with the rooms, it begins with the description of the disease that is plaguing Prospero’s lands. “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 redness and the horror