Gothic Reading Challenge Review: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

This is my third Gothic challenge read and the first classic Gothic novel I read for the challenge.

Genre: Gothic novel; historical
Year of publication: 1764
Setting & time: Medieval Italy, during the Crusades

Conrad, son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, is crushed beneath a gigantic helmet on the day he is to be wed to the Princess Isabella. Manfred, determined to secure a replacement for his only son and heir, decides to divorce his wife and marry Isabella, who objects and seeks sanctuary in a nearby church with the aid of a mysterious young man. These events are only the beginning of a convoluted and suspenseful story.

This, the very first Gothic novel, is a defining novel of the genre, with its air of perpetual menace, supernatural events, gloomy setting, driven villain, missing heirs, convoluted plot, thrills, shocks and revelations, noble heroes and damsels in distress. It is highly entertaining, although to me, a modern reader, probably not quite in the manner intended by the author. I found it very funny in parts, mostly because of all the melodrama involved.

The story is wonderfully plotted and convoluted and delivers one thrilling revelation after another. The characters are mostly flat, puppets to be controlled by the narrator and made to do his bidding, but it doesn't matter because the story is very much plot driven. The plotting is masterful, with every plot point resolved and all the threads tied up at the end, and a neat but not entirely happy ending (which rather surprised me).

Many of the plot points and the settings were, I believe, quite new to readers of the time, and would have seemed to them to be fresh and new, whereas to a jaded modern reader (like myself) nearly two and a half centuries after it was first published, it seems slightly worn, somewhat dusty and very melodramatic. This was undoubtedly a ground-breaking story, and one can see in it so many plot conventions and themes that are still used in modern genre literature.

I would have adored this story had I read it as a child. As it is, I respect it for being what it is, and recommend it to anyone interested in the beginnings of the sensation novel, the horror novel, and the suspense story (not to mention urban fantasy, which often reads like a Gothic novel removed from lonely castles and ruins to dreary urban settings). 3 stars.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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