The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole, 1764
A castle, an enormous helmet fallen from nowhere, and a tyrant with a guilty bloodline: the 1764 novel that invented gothic fiction and is still genuinely strange, funny and frightening.
Horace Walpole
1717–1797
Walpole, an MP and the prime minister's son, spent decades turning his villa Strawberry Hill into a mock castle, sparking the Gothic Revival in brick as well as on the page.
Feels like dread, power and unease.
Watch a man talk himself out of his own remorse.
Manfred, though persuaded, like his wife, that the vision had been no work of fancy, recovered a little from the tempest of mind into which so many strange events had thrown him. Ashamed, too, of his inhuman treatment of a Princess who returned every injury with new marks of tenderness and duty, he felt returning love forcing itself into his eyes; but not less ashamed of feeling remorse towards one against whom he was inwardly meditating a yet more bitter outrage, he curbed the yearnings of his heart, and did not dare to lean even towards pity. The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy. Books by Horace Walpole
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