Gothic Literature Book Reviews

First published in 1807 by Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy. Charles Maturin was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, but this didn't prevent him from taking Gothic writing seriously. His books reveal a dark, sometimes tortured imagination. Perhaps his best known novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), but here we will examine Fatal Revenge. The book was written when Maturin was a relatively young man, in his mid twenties, and doesn't have the same maturity as Melmoth, but the story is more straight forward.  The action takes place, mainly, around Naples in the latter part of the seventeenth century and tells the story of the Montorios, a family with more than their fair share of dark secrets. The main characters are the brothers, Ippolito and Annibal di Montorio. Ippolito, the elder brother, lives in his own residence in Naples. His younger brother lives with his father and younger siblings in the castle of Muralto. The brothers are different in natu...

                    Wieland  by Charles Brockden Brown was first published in 1798, by Hocquet Caritat, New York. It is one of the earliest American novels, following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and   certainly one of the earliest American Gothic novels.   Brockden Brown wanted to move away from  the European tradition of ruined castles, declining nobility and superstition, but his work still contains many of  the accepted Gothic tropes: isolation, mental illness, religious fervor, twisted genius and doomed  love. Brown uses scientific explanations to explain preternatural abilities. The style may not be to everyone's taste. It is verbose, verging on ponderous, which get in the way of the story, and some of the actions of the main characters seem not only improbable, but ludicrous. However, we can allow some  artistic license.            ...

 Welcome to this Gothic book review blog. For the first blog I have chosen O Caledonia  by Elspeth Barker. This book was first published in 1991 by Hamish Hamilton Publishers. This is a novella, runing to approx 150 pages, which makes it easy to read in one or two sittings. The story is set in the 1940s and 50s in Scotland, partly in Edinburgh and partly in the fictional Auchnasaugh Castle near Aberdeen. The title is taken from lines in The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Walter Scott:                                    O Caledonia! stern and wild,                                    Meet nurse for a poetic child. The poetic child is Janet, and the story opens when she is sixteen, or rather, when she was sixteen, because she is dead, murdered, and lying at the bottom of the s...