Thursday, December 15, 2016

Top ten gothic novels

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…
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue