A boy is thrown into the dungeon for not telling the King where she is until the very end when Justice is served.įrankenstein is not like the movie. The young Princess goes on the run-away from him while the Queen and his daughter at first have no idea of what is going on. The young Princess becomes the eye of desire of the King, who already has a worthy Queen. The Castle of Otranto is the story of a king who is going to marry his son ,the prince to a princess.On the day of the wedding there is a freak accident involving a statue falling. The best two stories in this book are Vathek and The Monk. Extreme and sensational, each of the four printed here is alos a powerful psychological story of isolation and monomania. This collection illustrates the range and attraction of the gothic novel. Frankenstein (1818, 1831) is Mary Shelley's disturbing and perennially popular tale of a young student who learns the secret of giving life to a creature made from human relics, with horrific consequences.

The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest, set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid. These include William Beckford's Vathek (1786), which alternates grotesque comedy with scenes of exotic magnificence in the story of the ruthless Caliph Vathek's journey to damnation. Crammed with catastrophe, terror, and ghostly interventions, the novel was an immediate success, and influenced numberous followers. The Gothic craze which Walpole is credited with inaugurating is often said to represent a break away from the orderliness and rationalism of earlier eighteenth-century literature (which is classified as ‘classical’ because of its love of order, as opposed to ‘romantic’ literature which embraces disorder and freedom), and The Castle of Otranto, thanks to its supernatural elements and emphasis on the breaking-up of order (represented by the edifice of the castle), certainly shows a move away from classicism towards a less orderly vision of the world.Macabre and melodramatic, set in haunted castles or fantastic landscapes, Gothic tales became fashionable in the late eighteenth century with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). But we can find precursors to the Gothic story in early ghost stories from as far back as the Middle Ages, and plays like Shakespeare’s Hamlet are shot through with what we’d now call ‘the Gothic’ and we can even point to earlier novels or novellas, such as William Baldwin’s early narrative Beware the Cat (written back in the 1550s), as precursors to the ‘Gothic’ novel as we conceive it, even if it resembles later masterpieces of the genre such as Jekyll and Hyde or The Beetle rather than early eighteenth-century Gothic novels like Walpole’s.

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