Safe Return Doubtful

Published 1796 – British Literature

At the age of just 19, in 1796, Matthew Lewis wrote what was to be, one of the greatest Gothic novels of all time. Lewis was certainly inspired another English writer of the day, Ann Radcliffe, but he experimented with the conventions of the Gothic novel while still indulging in the typical tropes and themes which form a traditional Gothic story.

It begins with a crowd gathered at a church in Madrid waiting to hear a mysterious priest, who was left at the abbey as a child, deliver a sermon. Ambrosio, that mysterious priest, is charismatic and popular with every crowd he addresses, a virtuous man of God. The plot charts Ambrosio’s decent into sin and temptation as he commits the sins of rape, murder, and sorcery.

The Devil, Lucifer, appears throughout the book though God is never featured, asking questions about the validity of God certainly as far as Lewis was concerned. The book was of course controversial, so much so that in the fourth edition Lewis was forced to revise it and make it less ‘offensive’.

There’s plenty of sex and nudity, torture, violence and deaths in the most nasty ways, perhaps not what one would expect from a book written in the eighteenth century. There is a thoroughly despicable set of characters who surprise the reader with their unpleasantness just as they started to warm to them.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5