The greatest ghost story ever told may be one of the first ever published. The Castle of Otranto doesn’t get everything right but those familiar tropes - the ghostly moan or creepy footsteps – are all there. Katie Lanning tells us how Horace Walpole created a new genre on today’s Why Should I Read This?
There are certain elements of a haunted house story that may seem commonplace now: the creaky door, the pictures on the walls that seem to move. But this was brand new stuff in 1764, when Horace Walpole wrote a story with no guardrails and no genre expectations attached. The Castle of Otranto is zany and experimental, an early iteration of the ghost story we’ve come to know and love. Read it to see what elements set the bar for the genre, and what elements didn’t quite take off in later tales: like, oh, I don’t know, a giant helmet suddenly falling from the sky?! There are even things that took a few centuries to catch on, like comically fearful characters in the vein of Scooby Doo and Shaggy. If only Walpole knew the word “Zoinks”! Anyway, I love this book because it really goes out on a creative limb (and that’s a pun if you read the book!), and we get to see what kind of story a person writes when there are no rules. You may laugh, you may scream – either way, you’ll have a great time.
