Vathek

William Beckford

67 pages
1.3 MB
PDF

The oriental gothic tale of a caliph who trades everything for forbidden knowledge. Beckford wrote it in French at twenty-one and it ends in one of the bleakest scenes in the genre.

Loading the book...

Found it useful? Share it

Download PDF Verified PDF · Secure download

Keep reading

Next in this topic
Zofloya
Charlotte Dacre · 143 pages

Charlotte Dacre gave the gothic a female villain who wants power rather than rescue. Condemned as depraved in 1806 and now read as one of the boldest novels of the period.

Read Download
Verified PDF · Secure download
Zastrozzi
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 66 pages

Shelley published this revenge tale at eighteen, years before his major poetry. A short, fevered gothic novel driven entirely by obsession.

Read Download
Verified PDF · Secure download
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen · 128 pages

Austen sends a reader of gothic novels to a real abbey and lets her imagination run ahead of the evidence. The sharpest parody the genre ever received, and affectionate about it.

Read Download
Verified PDF · Secure download
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 384 pages

Victor Frankenstein builds a living creature and abandons it. Mary Shelley turned the gothic inward and produced the first work of science fiction in the process.

Read Download
Verified PDF · Secure download
The Vampyre
John William Polidori · 66 pages

The 1819 story that created the aristocratic vampire, written after the same Geneva summer that produced Frankenstein. This annotated edition adds context on its Romantic origins.

Read Download
Verified PDF · Secure download