Name: The Castle of Otranto
ISBN: 9781840221848

Horace Walpole

Thomas Love Peacock

William Beckford

Three classic Gothic novels: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey and William Beckford's Vathek

Vathek and Nightmare Abbey

The Castle of Otranto

Abigail Mills

The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy. 

A bad husband is better than no husband at all. 

A by-stander often sees more of the game than those that play, answered Bianca. Does your

Seize him, continued Manfred, and bind him - the first news the princess hears of her champion shall be, that he has lost his head for her sake. 

Is my honesty the price I must pay for this dear youth's safety?

 For me! cried Theodore: let me die a thousand deaths, rather than stain thy conscience. 

It is sinful, replied the friar, to cherish those whom heaven has doomed to destruction. A tyrant's race must be swept from the earth to the third and fourth generation. 

Aren B.

a gothic story

M. Sosotris

An influential work, but more a curiosity than a book that really has much of an impact.

I appreciated the Hamlet-esque vibes: the vengeful ghost, the castle full of secrets, the layers of secrets, mistaken identity, and accidental murder, and scandal, and I think this would make for a genuinely fun play, or even a musical. The cast of characters is fun and full of drama.

But reading the book is a bit of a chore. Due to its age, the formatting is quite archaic, with no quotation marks or paragraph breaks when new characters start talking, so you just get vast blocks of text with whole conversations between multiple characters happening, and you are clinging to the dialogue tags like a sailor lost at sea holding onto fragments of the ship’s hull.

I need someone to adapt this for a visual medium so more people could enjoy it, because I seriously thing this story would work better as a play or a movie.

When Conrad, son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances on his wedding day, his father, fearing his line is at an end, declares that he will divorce his wife and marry his late son's intended bride. Soon, however, this planned union brings about a series of supernatural events, tragic misunderstandings and cold-blooded murder. Presented as the translation of a medieval Italian text from the time of the crusades, The Castle of Otranto was the first and most influential novel of the eighteenth-century Gothic revival, and introduced several of what became its most recognizable tropes.

Aida Mateescu

the man who made the strawberry hill castle would have made a dark souls clone in our modern times. this I fervently believe.

historically an exercise of literally like "how do I get other people interested in my hyperfixations..." like the man set his story in this period, in a castle, because he was obsessed with both. horace walpole was a neurodivergent king and his biographers have convinced me that he's crested the wave of renewed interest in the chivalric romance, resulting eventually in the fantasy genre we have today. 

the castle of otranto, though backed in its pseudo-realism or plausible religious truth, is an early fantasy/horror/historical hybrid, which critics have taken to call "gothic." technically the gothic is wapole's imitators. he was seemingly only interested in writing a historical novel. 

but this is modern understandings of the work. a more fluid understanding would be like: it's a shakespearean drama that tries to convincingly take place in a castle, leaning on elements of the chivalric romance to give it authenticity. I think the way walpole includes and executes the supernatural is subdued and interesting, but I have to remind myself his intentions as an author were not mine as a reader.

okay blah blah all of this about genre history, stuff most people don't care about, belies a more simple question: is it any good? I found it charmingly workmanlike. its imitation of shakespeare is impeccable; it is entirely a prose version of a drama that could have been put on the stage at the time. this conformism and dedication to imitation makes it feel, to the bone, kindred with SFF (lmao).

something that's interesting in the book is how the tragedy involves norms taken for granted. early on u discover manfred desires to start the practice of saint leonardo dicaprio, wanting to annul his marriage and trade in his current wife for his much younger niece (once removed? I can't keep track of the royal incest...) walpole inserts a bunch time-locked ideas about gender, but, he also intensely disapproves of manfred here (probably in reference of henry VIII). the absolute control the princes believe they have over their relations and their charges as a result of the birth becomes their own undoing, the suffering they inflict becomes mirrored in their own lives.

wasnotwhynot

the man who made the strawberry hill castle would have made a dark souls clone in our modern times. this I fervently believe.

historically an exercise of literally like "how do I get other people interested in my hyperfixations..." like the man set his story in this period, in a castle, because he was obsessed with both. horace walpole was a neurodivergent king and his biographers have convinced me that he's crested the wave of renewed interest in the chivalric romance, resulting eventually in the fantasy genre we have today. 

the castle of otranto, though backed in its pseudo-realism or plausible religious truth, is an early fantasy/horror/historical hybrid, which critics have taken to call "gothic." technically the gothic is wapole's imitators. he was seemingly only interested in writing a historical novel. 

but this is modern understandings of the work. a more fluid understanding would be like: it's a shakespearean drama that tries to convincingly take place in a castle, leaning on elements of the chivalric romance to give it authenticity. I think the way walpole includes and executes the supernatural is subdued and interesting, but I have to remind myself his intentions as an author were not mine as a reader.

okay blah blah all of this about genre history, stuff most people don't care about, belies a more simple question: is it any good? I found it charmingly workmanlike. its imitation of shakespeare is impeccable; it is entirely a prose version of a drama that could have been put on the stage at the time. this conformism and dedication to imitation makes it feel, to the bone, kindred with SFF (lmao).

something that's interesting in the book is how the tragedy involves norms taken for granted. early on u discover manfred desires to start the practice of saint leonardo dicaprio, wanting to annul his marriage and trade in his current wife for his much younger niece (once removed? I can't keep track of the royal incest...) walpole inserts a bunch time-locked ideas about gender, but, he also intensely disapproves of manfred here (probably in reference of henry VIII). the absolute control the princes believe they have over their relations and their charges as a result of the birth becomes their own undoing, the suffering they inflict becomes mirrored in their own lives.

After the death of his only son on his wedding day, Manfred, the Prince of Otranto, determines to marry the bride-to-be, setting himself on a course of destruction.

A Gothic Story

Kendall McClain

The first gothic story written- a true trailblazer<3 very interesting and absurd plot. It was giving cheesy Shakespeare with all the tragedy and the sudden revelations that everyone is related lmao I liked it but some parts were too far fetched

Marie

The Castle of Ontranto

Joey Baker

Yo why do old people talk all gay and shit?

Fuckin wall of text: The Novel(la)

Despite being only 100+ pages, this shit was hard to get through. 

Dude's son was finna get some pussy (finally!), dies on his pussy-gettin day, and his dad is like "smdh. Now I got no son, and my bitch too old". So rather than letting good pussy go to waste, he decides he finna cash his old bitch in for a new one. So he tries to rape, and she's like "ong you cappin rn!" and runs away. 
Yada Yada Yada, the girls dad shows up, and the Dude (prince) was like "yo, sorry about your daughter. But I see you eyeballin my hot ass 14 yo daughter. How about you can have my daughters pussy if I can have yours?"
DEAL!! exclaims the father. 
And uh, the prince stabs his own daughter? Then, fucking, the ghost finally shows up, and he a big ghost. And he's like yo, yung Theodore (central character I never mentioned) over there is my blood, cuz" then flies away to heaven and St. Nicholas is in the sky. 
Then it all comes full circle when Ted, who really wanted pussy off the prince's daughter and is sad now he won't get the chance to hit, decides that, yeah, maybe he could get some pussy off Isabella after a good month mourning period.

Millie

the father of gothic literature is also tagged on here as horror, but the real dread came from not knowing if the next page would be more mind-numbing than the last.

Melody Izard

Supposed to be the first Gothic novel. I think perhaps I just discovered I most positively am not a fan of the Gothic novel. 
There is a giant of some sort and a mean king and a charming good princes and an attempt at murdering a queen so that the mean king can marry the young princess who was supposed to marry his son - who he thinks is dead but really is not. And it was just confusing and tedious to me.

Neveen Badr

** spoiler alert **
           Laughter 
Passion 
Weeping
Melancholy 
Knighthood

Church
A grave 
Ghost
A young woman is distressed 
Death of almost everyone 

This novel is perfect!

Anna V

It was extremely sexist, but it is kind of OLD, so. Also, everyone is extremely forgiving.

Alexia Cambaling

Erin 

I once took a goth class in my first year of uni where the entire class was dedicated to gothic subculture and it was great. We watched Psycho, I wrote my final paper on Harry Potter, and we read this book. I had never read anything like it before, but I found it oddly intriguing. Would probably read again outside of a class context to see if I feel any differently.

Samantha Murguia

Oona Walraet

karissa🌙

Yvette

Library Edition

Alice Jones 

a gothic story / Horace Walpole ; edited by W.S. Lewis with a new introduction and notes by E.J. Clery.

The castle of Otranto

Sarah Sammis

ellie 💐💌⭐️

Arianna M

Francesca

In "The Castle of Otranto," Manfred is a usurper who wants to consolidate his reign over Otranto by marrying his weak son off to Isabella, heir to a more legitimate prince. But there is an old prophecy which warns against such moves, and on the day of the wedding a gigantic iron helmet falls over Manfred's son's head. This monstrous mishap is only the beginning of this funnily creepy tale. But the plot, though wild and entertaining, is the least important thing about this 1764's novel. The really attractive, entertaining and literarily important thing is the creation of stereotypes: the foul weather; an ancient, dark castle full of closed halls, secret passages, corridors and doors; frightening apparitions; wicked tyrants desperate for fertile women; virtuous and pure ladies; heroic lads; dark and cold forests where ghosts appear, etc. Horace Walpole, who seems to have been an interesting man, must have had enormous fun writing this tone-setting book, which has had plenty of children in literature. Though imperfect in literary terms, "The Castle of Otranto" is well worth reading if for no other reason than to discover where many of the commonplaces in Gothic literature come from. The characters in "The Castle of Otranto" are more like "types" than living human beings. That said, the book is a breezy example of an early novel, before the Victorians got hold of the form and made the books longer and more "respectable." Author Horace Walpole was the son of the prominent 18th century politician Robert Walpole, who is satirized in John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" and in a number of works written by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Perhaps fortunately, Robert Walpole passed away before Horace wrote this book!

The Castle of Otranto Vathek and Nightmare Abbey

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