Melmoth the Wanderer

Published in 1764, this is the novel that invented gothic fiction: a cursed castle, a giant helmet falling from the sky, and a tyrant desperate to keep his line alive. Short, strange, and the starting point for every haunted house story that followed.

Horace Walpole

A caliph sells his soul for forbidden knowledge in this 1786 oriental gothic tale, which ends in one of the most terrifying underworlds in English fiction. Includes a memoir of the eccentric Beckford.

William Beckford

The 1794 bestseller that defined the gothic heroine: Emily St. Aubert, locked in a remote Apennine castle, facing veiled secrets and sounds in the night. Radcliffe's slow-building dread made her the most famous novelist of her time.

Ann Radcliffe

A revered Madrid abbot falls into lust, sorcery, and murder in this 1796 shocker, written when Lewis was just 19. It scandalized its readers and remains the most transgressive novel of the early gothic.

Matthew Gregory Lewis

The first great American gothic novel (1798): a pious Pennsylvania family is torn apart by mysterious voices and religious madness. A dark study of fanaticism told by a narrator who can barely trust her own senses.

Charles Brockden Brown