Lynne Truss is the author of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves,
Cat Out of Hell, the newly released
The Lunar Cats, and other books. One of her ten top gothic novels, as shared at the
Guardian:
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
While there are now some classy editions of The Monk (1796), with scholarly introductions and fine art on the covers, my own copy is a Sphere paperback from 1974. It is proudly announced as number 24 of the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult and features a photograph of a busty loose-haired woman wearing a crucifix, with a dark cowl obscuring the top of her face. It is ghastly, but mainly for the wrong reasons. “She lifted her veil slowly. What a sight presented itself to my startled eyes! I beheld before me an animated corpse.” Wheatley’s introduction may not be academic in nature, but it does come with a facsimile signature (readers always appreciate that), and also provides the knockout information that “Monk” Lewis was the first tenant of a particular apartment (K1) in Piccadilly’s famous Albany. By a creepy coincidence, it was in K1 itself that the idea of the Library of the Occult series was first proposed…
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--Marshal Zeringue
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