Review: The Monk

The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For a hard-core fan of Gothic novels/short stories like me, this is like three, four books for the price of one. (though, to be honest, I read it via Amazon's free world's classics library).

On top of the excellent intertwining stories that help construct what is almost a portmanteau (another fave of mine and 380 years before the Amicus production films and 400 before Tarantino's Pulp Fiction), framed by the spiralling decadence into wickedness and the dark side of martydom of the monk Ambrosio, you have, as a more than welcomed bonus, nearly anything that a haunted-castle lover can think of thrown in to complete the deal:
Said eerie, Washington Irving-like castles, M.R.James's-like creepy, decaying and chatty ghosts, incarceration of innocents, burial of the living among rotting corpses, witchcraft... you name it!

Just don't be fooled by the apparently slow start, as everything in it has the sole purpose of building up into several secondary (but none the less dramatic) climaxes instead of one. With that in mind, and if what I described quenches your eagerness for more, do expect to be surprised more than once!

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