Gothic novels

I've been in bed with flu for a couple of days, and have been reading a couple of Gothic novels.

I've read a few previously, most notably C. Maturin's Melmoth the wanderer, which I read mainly because I once lived in Melmoth, and was curious about the origin of the name (yes, I know it was named after Sir Melmoth Osborn, British Resident of Zululand after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, but where did he get his name from?)

And then of course there are the books of H.P. Lovecraft, which are a sort of 20th-century revival or continuation of the genre. I began reading those after Irving Hexham of the religious studies department of the University of Calgary, once remarked on a discussion forum for new religious movements that there was in fact an H.P. Lovecraft cult -- that there were people who believed that the mysterious grimoire that the wrote about, the Necronomicon really existed and was locked away in a secret vault of the Miskatonic University.

And I've also read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which is a parody of the genre, and one would really need to be familiar with the genre to fully appreciate it.

So I've just read Horace Walpole's The castle of Otranto and William Beckford's Vathek. And I was quite pleasantly surprised; they were much better than I expected.

They didn't, like Lovecraft and his inferior imitators, try to induce shudders in the reader by piling on strange adjectives like "eldrich". They also weren't nihilist like Lovecraft, but were quite moral. From reading about Gothic novels I had got the impression that they were filled with Protestant English horrors about the unnatural life of monks and nuns and the wicked things they get up to (there's plenty of that in Melmoth), but in both these novels holy men (both Roman Catholic and Muslim) are treated as deserving respect. And the common thread that runs though them both is the abuse of power by unjust rulers, who eventually fall under divine judgement.

That was something I didn't quite expect from 18th-century Enlightenment authors.

Oh well, Frankenstein is next on the list, and I'm also reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.