Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Online Free Page A

sister and murder his mother, and a final confrontation with Lucifer himself leaves Ambrosia's broken and bleeding corpse to the insects. Sub-plots, essential to a Gothic novel, feature the Wandering few and a sad spectre known as the Bleeding Nun. By going beyond the comparatively polite horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, Lewis earned the admiration of such figures as Byron and de Sade, the displeasure of many "respectable" folks, and a nickname, "Monk", that stayed with him to the grave. The Monk , his first novel, was written before Lewis' 21st birthday; he followed it with a succession of lesser romances, tales and plays, including The Castle Spectre (1797), Tales of Terror (1799) The Bravo of Venice (1805), and One O'clock, or The Knight and Wooddemon (1811). The Monk was filmed in 1972 as La Moine , with Franco Nero in the title role.
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    The Monk , although it was published almost two hundred years ago, in 1796, may legitimately claim to be the first modern horror novel in the English language. Predecessors like Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe had pioneered the Gothic tale, but the stories they told tended to be distressingly genteel and moralistic. This was not enough for Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, while little more than a boy, produced a work that was outrageous, offensive, and obnoxious, one that still demonstrates its power to dismay. A standard history of English literature claims that it exhibits "the perverted lust of a sadist". Can there be a higher recommendation? Set in the early 17th century, The Monk was a period piece even in 1796, yet it contains enough bad attitudes to raise a few hackles even today. Attacked for obscenity and blasphemy, the book was censored in its later editions, in no small measure because it had been revealed that the writer, who penned the novel at the tender age of nineteen, had recently become a Member of Parliament. The author's youth is ultimately more important than his government credentials, for this is a work of enthusiasm and excess, its audacity and adolescence speaking to and for the audience that has always eagerly embraced the horrific. The Monk sneers at convention: its episodes include dead babies, mangled nuns, murdered mothers, deflowered virgins, and sex-crazed clergymen. This is the sort of material that 20th-century artists have frequently flaunted to provide their own emblems of emancipation, but Lewis had staked out the territory long before the grandparents of his followers were born. Such calculated bad taste made Lewis a celebrity in his time, yet he also embodied the essential paradox of the horror writer: contemporaries from Lord Byron to Sir Walter Scott describe him as an honorable and kindly man. Literary historians have reduced him to the catalyst whose personal influence inspired Polidori's The Vampyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , but in his lifetime he was recognized for his own achievements, and rightly so. Lewis cut to the bone. In the depraved monk Ambrosio, Lewis created a character that speaks uneasily to readers centuries later. Ambrosio is Faustian, in the traditional mode, but he represents not the lust for power, or the lust for money, or even the lust for knowledge. What he displays, embarrassingly but importantly, is the lust for lust. He is the forefather of a roster of lascivious villains from Dracula through Norman Bates to Freddy Krueger. Despite its overblown language and its overstrained coincidences, The Monk is a revolutionary work. It defies polite society, and it also challenges the limits of its genre. The evil in this tale is not exterior, an outside outrage to be subdued by the representatives of civility and good taste. Rather, the evil is within its protagonist, and there is no bland embodiment of virtue to stand in his path. The evil runs its course, consuming itself rather than facing defeat from the forces of conformity. This is not melodrama, but tragedy, and as such it shames most of the popular