Matthew Lewis (1) (1775–1818)

Gosh, where to start? This late eighteenth century (1796) shocker by Matthew Lewis is still surprisingly readable. It rattles along at quite a pace despite the occasional weird meandering to insert a horror or new angle. Altogether not bad for a bored nineteen year old acting as a diplomatic intern.

Given that William Beckford's 'Vathek' (1782), another lush horror though orientalist in tone, was begun by a rich youngster at 22 and that Mary Shelley knocked out 'Frankenstein' (1818) before show more she was 21, we have a phenomenon here of youthful imagination exorcising its anxieties in gothick mode.

As Beckford used the world of the Arabian Nights so Lewis goes into the collective imagination of the English in order to express strangeness and horror - the alien Spain of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition which held the same fearful fascination as the red peril of communism would do later.

Beckford is writing well over a century after the panic over the Popish Plot and two centuries after the Armada but Spanish Catholicism, its 'superstition' and its alleged totalitarian cruelties could still send a shiver down the spines of any Englishman. There but for the grace of God and all that.

Underlying the text is an Anglo-Saxon empiricist's sense of superiority over a culture that believes in saints' relics and uses incense which he then subverts by using it to play on the equally superstitious sensibilities of his readers with tales of ghosts and examples of sorcery.

An amazing sequence (written for a cinema that could not exist) has a religious procession cascading into mayhem, an assault on a convent, the tearing to shreds of an errant prioress and the burning of nuns guilty and innocent alike.

On this atavistic framework, Lewis builds a story of aristocratic honour and love, of the sin of pride and the roots of hypocrisy, of cruel superstition and of dark magic in which a rather Catholic conception of the Devil and Hell plays its role to deliver a true horror novel.

Subversion lies in using a ready-made atmosphere of cultural fear to introduce more basic fears - of the mob, of the hypocrisy of evil (the other minds problem), premature burial, seduction in a shame culture, ghosts, loss of sexual control, rape, entrapment in a totalitarian institution and more.

But what struck this reader was not so much how Lewis took the Gothick to new levels of extremity for the time (and introduced fairly transgressive sexual themes) but how mature his reading of human psychology was beneath the formal literary narrative expectations we might have.

At one point we get a detailed account of a woman waking in a sepulchre amongst suppurating corpses and at another a carefully drawn account of how a naive woman might be captured by a seducer and how the women around her work to protect her.

We get an interpolated ghost story after a conventional tale of banditti in the German forest but within this again we see an almost filmic interplay of our hero Lorenzo and the attempt of the bandit leader's wife to warn him of the plot to murder him.

There is a lot of this interplay between a melodramatic story line and acute understanding (remarkable given the age of the author) of human psychology. By the end of the book I came to feel that it had been underrated and deserved much more attention.

The book is certainly not classically proportioned. The tormented super villain of the story (also treated with sophistication in regard to his complex inner life) disappears for a huge chunk of the book after his introduction in order to permit more sensation.

However, somehow it all hangs together. Its sheer momentum gives us a series of succeeding climaxes of increasing horror. Its reception was to be much like that of the video nasties of the early 1980s.

Quite a bit of self censorship was necessary for later editions especially as Lewis was to become an MP (in the age of rotten boroughs) not too long after. He, like Beckford, was from a slave-owning family whose wealth came from sugar. He died in 1818 of yellow fever returning from Jamaica.

Nevertheless, the book was immensely popular on publication. It set the tone (if later muted) for the rise of the Gothick as horror rather than terror. It might perhaps even be seen as an inventor of the 'jump scare' that is now a cliche in cinema.

It is the subject matter that sustains the horror. The Gothick tropes are intensified beyond the clanking chain, sins of the past, dungeons and moonlight (with owls hooting) into rape, incest, carefully described murder, starvation, sex (surprisingly explicit), corpses and demonology.

With many characters excellently drawn and feeling very real despite the fantastic framework, Lewis' adolescent sensibility seems itself to be expressed in the passions of the characters. He seems to be imagining himself into extreme situations in a most remarkable way.

The character of Ambrosio, the monk of the title, is of course central and critical. At one level conventional (his fall comes from the sin of pride from which all else springs), this perpetrator of evil is far from one dimensional. He has a rich internal life if a self-deluding one.

His pride makes him lack self awareness. He slides from dark act to dark act with the unleashing of his 'shadow', passions that he ultimately cannot control while periodically recognising his predicament. And yet he is also manipulated - victim almost as much as perpetrator.

The cause of his doom lies in Rosario/Matilda who seems not to be a demon (but who may be) but more a sorcerer in the dark arts with a prodigious and manipulative libido whose transgressive sexuality has a certain libertarian integrity to it. She personifies absolute moral rebellion.

As to the other characters (Don Lorenzo, his sister Agnes (imprisoned in a sepulchre with her dead child) and lover of Lorenzo's friend Don Raymond, Lorenzo's love Antonia (raped and murdered) and her family network, these are interweaved artfully. You care about their condition.

Yes, the boys can appear exceptionally dim and self-absorbed at the expense of the girls (always the victims, our scream queens) but this is a group of young adults - the eighteenth century version of the world of the High School. Antonia has been criticised as just too perfect but she is only 15.

Of course, Ambrosio gets his comeuppance in ways that might genuinely have frightened its audience far more than the more visceral body horror but the book's conclusion is pragmatically cynical just we might expect in the period of Choderlos de Laclos and the Barber of Seville.

Let us not do any more detailed spoiler here. Let us just say that Lorenzo does rather well for himself, possibly better than if Ambrosio had never existed, and leave it like that. The young aristocrats (barring one who lost her honour and had to be dealt with accordingly by Lewis) survive and prosper. show less

There seems to be no bounds to the depravity in which the human condition can hide. What Matthew Lewis created with his 1796 Pre Gothic masterpiece “The Monk” vividly lays our vices and desires out to bear. Lewis initially had this story truncated so it would not interfere with his standing as a member of English Parliament, but later released the whole manuscript. A young woman obsessed with a highly praised and respected monk in Madrid infiltrates a monastery as a man and seduces the show more highest example of piety of the time. And what ensues is way beyond any of the known vices and many unknown. Lechery, deceit and self damnation are only the beginning steps of the journey our characters place their feet on their path to what is surely a not so cozy place in perdition. Knowing you are wrong for a misdeed is the first step to repentance. Knowing you are wrong for a misdeed and seeking to bury not only yourself but everyone around you is something else. Sounds Cliché? Not hardly. This story offers way more than the typical temptation yarn. The ending will have you squatting in a field of thorns while trying to decide if you are just as evil as the fictional characters you just read about and how you could possibly be redeemed for taking part in such a journey. That is if you want to be redeemed or choose to push the thorns deeper to see what it feels like. The flames await. show less

Once in a while it's very pleasant to read a story where the ghosts, witches, dissembling demons, Wandering Jew, evil nuns, cross-dressers, murderous brigands, Inquisitional tortures, violated maidens, mad monks, mouldering corpses (or "Corses" to use the quaint vernacular), secret passages, dank dungeons, all-pervading air of carnality and Satan himself are not just implied, metaphorical, or artifacts of a disordered psyche, but actually real.

Here's Old Nick in all his pomp:

He appeared in show more all that ugliness which since his fall from heaven had been his portion: His blasted limbs still bore marks of the Almighty’s thunder: A swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form: His hands and feet were armed with long Talons: Fury glared in his eyes, which might have struck the bravest heart with terror: Over his huge shoulders waved two enormous sable wings; and his hair was supplied by living snakes, which twined themselves round his brows with frightful hissings. In one hand He held a roll of parchment, and in the other an iron pen. Still the lightning flashed around him, and the Thunder with repeated bursts, seemed to announce the dissolution of Nature. show less

“The Monk” is like nothing else I’ve ever read.

Although it’s poorly constructed in terms of paragraphing and certain structural elements – this was written in the 1790s, after all – the unusual yet original plot, its diverse themes, plus a rare cast of characters make up for any defects.

Every so often the author injects a line – usually in dialogue – that is such a surprise it made me pause with raised eyebrows; a “Did I read that right?” type of moment. Or, if you show more prefer, a “Bloody hell!” type of moment. I mean this in a positive way. Matthew Lewis could write the most unexpected twists in a tale.

The tone for the most part is a sinister one, yet every so often humour pops up to lighten the tone. We have sexual encounters and pure horror. “The Monk” is a blend of many themes that complement each other well. show less