The Castle of Otranto: The Original Gothic Romance Classic($9.99Value)

Description

"That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it." Published on Christmas Eve, 1764, The Castle of Otranto is the story that gave the Gothic its name. Walpole meant romance in the older sense — a tale of prophecy, usurped inheritance, and dread, set apart from the realistic fiction of his day. There is love in it, and it ends badly. What drives the book is a tyrant who can feel a prophecy closing around him and will do anything to outrun it. An Exquisite Cover Design — Antique gold on deep oxblood, framed by a Gothic arch and overtaken by thorned vines and withered roses — a prophecy closing in on a house whose beauty was taken, not earned. Complete and Unabridged — The full text, nothing condensed, modernized, or cut. Read as Its First Readers Did — The book opens with Walpole's hoax preface, in which "William Marshal, Gentleman" claims to have found the manuscript in an ancient library and translated it from a 1529 Italian printing. Nothing in the text gives the game away — you read it from inside the hoax, as readers did in 1764. Includes the sonnet to Lady Mary Coke and the epigraph from Horace. A Thoughtfully Designed Interior — Clean, generous typesetting with comfortable margins and clear chapter openings, set for reading rather than dense reprinting. An Editorial Afterword — An original essay on the book's strange composition, the hoax and its unmasking, and how a story about a falling helmet founded a genre. A Reader's Discussion Guide — Ten questions for book clubs, classrooms, and solitary rereading. About the Author — A portrait of the man who built a miniature castle on the Thames, wrote the most influential ghost story in English almost by accident, and spent his life calling it a trifle. A Giftable Keepsake Edition — Made to be given and kept, for the classics reader, the student of the Gothic, or anyone who has ever loved a story with a ruined castle in it. About This Edition: A print-on-demand paperback with a matte softcover finish. The cover is printed flat — the gold is printed ink, not foil, embossing, or raised texture. Pages are cream; the binding is glued, standard for print-on-demand paperbacks. Every copy is printed when you order it, so it arrives new and unhandled. On the morning of his wedding, Conrad — the sickly only son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto — is found crushed in the courtyard beneath an enormous black-plumed helmet fallen out of nowhere. Manfred does not grieve. He calculates. He knows the prophecy, and he knows exactly how his grandfather got the principality. Within hours he has resolved to put aside his wife and marry Isabella, his son's intended. Isabella runs. What follows is a feverish stretch of days in which the castle seems to take sides. A giant armored leg fills a locked gallery. A portrait steps down from its frame. A peasant named Theodore keeps turning up wherever Manfred least wants him. Isabella's father rides in with a hundred knights and a sword fifty men can barely carry. And Manfred's daughter Matilda, whom he has never once looked at with love, begins to fall for exactly the wrong person. Every thread pulls toward the same knot, and Manfred can feel it. He responds the way tyrants do — faster, harder, more secretly — until a night in the chapel when the dark and his own certainty betray him, and the walls of Otranto answer the prophecy in the only language they have. A story about a man who would rather bring down the house than let it pass out of his hands. Bring home the story where the Gothic began.