Castle of Otranto (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

With its fantastic apparitions, its ominous prophecies, and its complicated underground passages, The Castle of Otranto heralded a new genre, the Gothic novel, still present in our literary landscape today. Walpoles novel accomplished what no other novel had attempted before: to make readers enjoy what they shuddered to read, in other words to find beauty amidst literary materials ostensibly laced...