The Castle of Otranto is gothic, romantic, terrifying, and unbelievably over the top. It is one of those books that seems to exist beyond its pages because of the influence it has had on the literature that followed.  It is worth reading on its own merits, though, and it is possible to feel the thrill of the voluptuous and hyperbolic language that serves to create an atmosphere (at least for this reader) of almost equal parts hilarity and horror–easily demonstrated in the first pages with a terrifying death and, well, feathers.

Oh! my Lord! the Prince! the Prince! the helmet! the helmet!”
Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily, – but what a sight for a father’s eyes! – he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

It is possible that the feathers were supposed to be a chilling detail, a sort of connection to crows, ravens, and other black-feathered birds of ill-omen, but their “proportionable quantity”, while it could add to the image of dark and doom that the helmet evokes, also evoke the floppy feathers often found on women’s hats, and this combination of deep terror and unintentional hilarity continues for the rest of the novel.

Some of the humour comes from the simple fact that the language evokes a more formal time, and the relationships between the characters are marked by comments and descriptions that seem slightly bizarre, even beyond the extremely strange happenings that are meant to bewilder and confuse. The story begins, as mentioned, with a thump – the crash of a helmet upon Conrad, the sickly heir to Manfred’s castle, Otranto.  The family had gathered for Conrad’s impending wedding to the Princess Isabella, a lovely girl of good family, who, unfortunately for her, has caught the eye of Conrad’s father during her betrothal to the son.  Manfred, his wife Hippolita, and his daughter Matilda, all react to Conrad’s terrifying death in different ways. Matilda despairs of ever being able to become a nun, Hippolita is prostrate with grief, and Manfred, well Manfred decides that the best way to solve the problem (and avoid a pesky curse that implies his ownership of Otranto is less righteous and permanent than he would like) is to marry Isabella himself–callously setting Hippolita aside to indulge his attraction to Isabella and his possessiveness of Otranto.

Of course, the villain of the piece must be tempered with a hero, and, soon after the crushing of Conrad, Theodore enters the piece. Theodore has a propensity for getting himself involved with the various damsels in distress fleeing fates worse than death, and he meets and aids both Isabella and Matilda. Theodore (and, it must be said, the curse) triumphs over Manfred, but the victory is not without its own darkness and Theodore eventually ends with a sigh because he can find:

no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul

The Castle of Otranto, from the gorgeous new cover to the timeless words of the story itself, still has the power to thrill, more than 200 years after it first burst upon the scene.

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