pit and the pendulem by Edgar Allan Poe

The aim of the story is very simply to create a dark atmosphere of foreboding and anticipatory horror, and Poe achieves this by minutely tracking the path of the unnamed narrator's thoughts and experiences. Although the narrator is, like most of Poe's first-person protagonists, somewhat unreliable in nature, his unreliability is circumstantial, stemming from his fear and physical weakness rather than from guilt or inherent madness.