The Monk

Ambrosio is the most admired monk in Madrid — a figure of such apparent holiness that crowds gather to hear him preach. He is also about to be destroyed. When a mysterious young novice is revealed to be a woman in disguise — and a woman sent, it eventually becomes clear, by a very specific supernatural agent — Ambrosio begins a descent that Matthew Lewis, who was nineteen when he wrote this novel, traces with the confidence of someone who has visited every circle of hell in advance.

Published in 1796 to immediate scandal, The Monk is the most extreme and most compulsively readable of the original Gothic novels — the one that makes everything Radcliffe wrote look timid by comparison, the one that Byron admired, the one that established the template for two centuries of transgressive fiction. Lewis’s plot accumulates horror with the relentless logic of nightmare, and his prose — lurid, precise, and occasionally darkly funny — drives you through it at a pace that doesn’t permit you to stop and think about what you’re reading until it’s too late.

An essential work of Gothic literature. A genuinely shocking book. Published by Penguin Classics.