This book is the earliest and most influential of the Gothic novels. First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the second edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." He gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting...

Gothic fiction by more than 40 known and unknown writers. They range from William Sansom's A Woman Seldom Found, on an encounter in Rome between a man and a woman, to Paul Bowle's Allal, on an Arab boy who switches bodies with a snake