What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

If this sounds cliche, like any number of romances, or even Shakespearian drama, it is, in a way. What Walpole sought to do with The Castle of Otranto was create a ‘new romance’, a new take on the tales of chivalric knights that had been written for several centuries before him. His new take involved adding elements of the supernatural and macabre, harking back to the superstitious Dark Ages when the story is set. He called this new style ‘gothic’.

For me, the most obvious examples of gothic literature are Dracula and Frankenstein, with Wuthering Heights being another novel incorporating gothic elements that springs to mind. But The Castle of Otranto was the first to introduce many of the elements that would define that genre: it has the overbearing castle, obviously, a secret underground castle, mysterious happenings, a ghost, a prophecy, a mysterious stranger, scenes of the macabre, and probably some other things I’m missing out.

The tightness of the narrative is what so impressed me though. There is no lingering upon the unexpected absurdity of giant pieces of armour, even on the giant foot some servants claim to have seen, rather, the characters act according to their most immediate desires: the prince relentlessly pursuing his son’s former fiance, Isabella trying to escape his pursuit, and everyone else caught up in the middle. There is no great complexity to the story or the characters, yet from simple elements, Walpole weaves a compelling narrative, which is, of course, the best way to write: to create something complex from simple elements. The Castle of Otranto is like, to paraphrase a metaphor from Philip Pullman’s Clockwork, a beautiful piece of machinery that can be wound up and set going in an intricate display of delicate precision.

That characters are archetypes, yes, have even been described as ciphers, which allows you to immediately understand them. But then, as part of the machinery, they are also more. The Prince, Manfred, for example, though tyrannical and monomaniacal during the events of the novella, can also be seen as a sympathetic character. He is not entirely unreasonable, except when gripped with passionate rage, and there is suggestion that in less desperate times he was a well-liked ruler of his people.

In short, The Castle of Otranto has enthused me. I was getting rather bored with Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, which isn’t as good as her later novels, and I’ve been losing enthusiasm for my own writing. My current work is far too aestheticised, and the story is being lost in it, so I no longer like it. I feel I may have to at some point, if not before my next assessment, significantly rewrite parts of it to make it more natural, more readable and more compelling. I kind of feel like I’d also like to try something new, because I’ve almost painted myself into a corner with my writing, gone so far down a Modernist-style route that I’ve lost my way. I think I need a fresh lease, though I’m not quite sure in what direction that will lie. For now though, since I’ve finished The Castle of Otranto, I have been inspired to return to Don Quixote, which is the most similar novel I currently have, and I had forgotten how well-written and how funny it is.