The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by John Polidori and others

This collection of "Tales of the Macabre" is very uneven in style, tone, and quality.  The introduction tells us that this collection was put together to complement a previous Oxford volume, Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine.  Blackwood's, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, was extremely influential and widely read in the 19th century, containing essays on political and social issues, as well as literary offerings.  It published works by the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, William Godwin, James Hogg, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, thus contributing to the development of the Romantic movement.  The Tale of Terror was in its heyday, and the magazines supplied the reading public with a steady stream of the macabre, horrific, and sensational.

Not content with limiting themselves with tales of terror from Blackwood's magazine, Oxford produced The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre: "The aim of the present collection, however, is to exhibit the variety and vitality of the terror-tales and similarly macabre fiction published in the rival magazines  of London and Dublin, in the two decades following the appearance of Polidori's tale; that is, the 1820s and 1830s."  These are very narrow parameters, which limit the scope and quality of tales included in this collection.  

"Sir Guy Eveling's Dream" by Horace Smith is written in a pseudo-archaic style so bizarre and convoluted, with vocabulary to rival Jabberwocky, that I thought I might have hit my head and not realized it as I struggled to make sense of it all.

The absolute worst tale here has to be "Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman" by William Carleton.  It reminded me of the torture that is reading The Valley of Fear, that blight on the Sherlock Holmes canon loosely based on the Molly Maguires and Pinkerton detectives.  The Ribbonmen were a secret society of violent Irish radicals.  While their midnight meeting in a chapel has imagery suggestive of a Black Mass, this tale quickly descends into gruesome (and disgusting) descriptions of violence.  This type of story is not the type of macabre story that I like.

I found "The Red Man" by Catherine Gore lurid and in extremely poor taste.  Miss Gore lived up to her name.

Putting these three aside, the rest of the tales were interesting and engaging to varying degrees, and a couple of them were real gems.  Madness, fears of being buried alive, the bodysnatching craze of 19th century, castles, secret passages, graveyards, and curses all make an appearance.  I loved the fairytale imagery (with a twist) in "The Bride of Lindorf," and the folklore feel of "The Master of Logan."   One of the best tales was "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" by the Irish Gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu.  This one is part tale of terror, part locked room mystery, and was later developed into Le Fanu's novel Uncle Silas.  

Of course the real draw of this collection is "The Vampyre" by John Polidori.  I think a discussion of Dr. Polidori's tale merits its own post at some future date.  For now, suffice it to say that this is the tale that launched the vampire craze in literature which carries on to this day, and was the product of that infamous ghost story competition which also gave us Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  This Oxford edition provides a bit of introductory material and notes on the publishing history.  It includes the "Letter from Geneva" that accompanied the anonymous manuscript to the publishing house, as well as a later "Note on 'The Vampyre'" by Polidori and Byron's "Fragment" which influenced Polidori's tale.

This Oxford collection would earn a place on my shelves for Polidori alone, but I very much enjoyed some of these other tales of the macabre.

Chosen for my Tea and Ink Society 2024 Classics Reading Challenge for October: a spooky classic or short story collection.

Weekly Reading Journal, October 13-19, 2024

Reading Journal is a day late this week because I was under the weather, but this gives me a chance to share the results of my Classics Club Spin.  Spin #39 was announced last Saturday, and I have been agog with anticipation awaiting the results.  As of this morning, the Wheel has spoken, and I will be reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer!  I have only read selected tales, so I am excited to read this work in its entirety.  My list is always compiled using a random number generator, but, weirdly, it generated several Gothic tales this time.  I was convinced that I'd get one of those, but I am not disappointed.

This week I started making my way through Tremendous Trifles, an essay collection by G.K. Chesterton.  There is no writer quite like Chesterton, in style or substance; he's always an interesting read.  I particularly loved a passage from the essay "A Piece of Chalk," which, on the surface, is about young Chesterton drawing with chalks upon brown paper out in the countryside:

They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

I love nature art of all sorts, from Romantic landscape to medieval manuscript borders to natural history illustration, so I was dubious about the start of this passage.  By the end, my breath was taken away.  I love where Chesterton went with this - artists and poets were always taking inspiration from nature on the plane of symbol and emotion, if not as direct copyists.

I finished three books this week, two of them on the same day!  On Wednesday I finally wrapped up Vanity Fair, which I have been reading for weeks, and also finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which was a short read.  On Friday I came to the end of The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton.  Reviews to follow.

I did read some spooky stories from The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by John Polidori and others, but nothing that has really thrilled me yet.

COMMONPLACE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past." - G.K. Chesterton, "A Piece of Chalk," from Tremendous Trifles

ART OF THE WEEK

Jane Morris: Study for "Mariana" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868

Chalk on brown paper, in honor of Chesterton's essay. :)  This is a study of Jane Morris which Rossetti later referred to for his painting of Mariana, completed in 1870.  "Mariana" is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, based on the character of Mariana in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.  Tennyson's poem very much inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, with Millais and John William Waterhouse also creating paintings based upon it.  The subject of a poem is a woman weary from waiting for her lover to return, forlorn, isolated, and despondent.  I actually prefer this chalk drawing to Rossetti's later painting - it better captures that expression of melancholy weariness on Jane's face, and her very posture seems listless and tired.  What makes you weary, Jane?  Is it your marriage to William Morris?  Is casting you as Mariana a sly comment by Rossetti that you should prefer him?

The Castle of Otranto (1977)

When I finished reading The Castle of Otranto, I checked to see if there had ever been any film adaptations of the story, though I had never heard of any.  Imagine my delight when I discovered this short film from 1977, directed by Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer.  Only 17 minutes long, it's structured as a mockumentary frame story in live action, featuring an adaptation of the story itself presented in cut-out animation.    

The film is set at a castle in Czechoslovakia, where amateur archaeologist Dr. Vozáb is being interviewed by a reporter.  Dr. Vozáb relates that Walpole's Gothic novel is based upon true events, and that the story has its origin not in the Italian town of Otranto, but here at the Czech Castle Orthany, near Náchod.  We are shown artifacts the good doctor has uncovered, and take a walk to the caves where Isabella hid.  The doctor's findings grow ever more fantastic, and I won't say more lest I spoil it for you!

Cut-out animation was the perfect medium to tell the story.  In the very first scene, we are looking at an actual book edition of The Castle of Otranto, turning pages and then focusing on an illustration of a castle.  It fills the frame and we begin to explore the illustration, subtly transitioning into exploring the interior of the illustrated castle, which we could not have have done by looking at the page in the book.  The lines between the tangible reality of the book and the imaginative world of the story have been blurred, mirroring the inner experience of an engaged imagination while reading.  The physical book begins to fade into the background as we read; we "live" in the story.  Cut-out animation is book illustration come to almost life.  It retains a slightly static, paperlike and two-dimensional storybook quality.  We are in a book, but the words are beginning to take on life, as scenes cut back and forth between turning pages and animated figures.  The juxtaposition of the scenes of the archaeologist and the reporter exploring the castle and looking at artifacts with the animated story world blur the lines between reality and imagination even further, until the glorious ending, when the two worlds merge into one.

The artwork and the overall tone of the film have that touch of macabre humor I always enjoy.  I feel like Edward Gorey would have liked this film.

Watch it HERE

Classics Club Spin #39

An October wind is blowing, the pale moon peeks from behind the clouds, the hoot of an owl rings out in the night as Lady Fortuna's hand hovers at the Wheel... Classics Club Spin #39 is Fraught with Peril!  Gothic novels, fiends, satanic pacts, dark secrets, ruined castles, and Our Mutual Friend!  

What literary terrors await?  We find out on Sunday, October 20th!

1.  Rob Roy - Sir Walter Scott

2.  The Lottery and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson

3.  The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

4.  Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets - Thomas De Quincey

5.  From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne

6.  The Book of Margery Kempe - Margery Kempe

7.  The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot

8.  The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy

9.  Faust - Goethe

10.  Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock

11.  The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe

12.  A Sentimental Journey - Laurence Sterne

13.  Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift

14.  Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Maturin

15.  Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas De Quincey

16.  Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon

17.  Piers Ploughman - William Langland

18.  The Monarch of the Glen - Compton Mackenzie

19.  Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

20.  Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope

Update:  THE WHEEL HAS SPOKEN!  I will be reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Weekly Reading Journal, October 6-12, 2024

It's October, so it's time to pull out my collections of ghost stories and classic tales of horror for some spooky seasonal reading.  Where to start?  Perhaps "Green Tea" by Sheridan Le Fanu, or "The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood.

Perhaps the biggest news in reading this week is that I finally finished The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.  It certainly feels good to have come to the end of that particular pilgrimage.  I also read Rasselas this week, completing my first book by Samuel Johnson and checking off a category on my Literary Life Reading Challenge.  

On Monday morning, I woke early and read Treacle Walker by Alan Garner in one sitting.  Some of Garner's books can go quickly like this.  I have been a fan of Alan Garner ever since discovering the 1969 Granada television adaptation of his novel The Owl Service, in which the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd manifests in the lives of three teenagers in 1960's Wales.  Treacle Walker and Garner's novel Elidor also explore the theme of myth, folklore, and ancient landscape memory intersecting with the modern "ordinary" world, making our world seem not so ordinary.

I have just started We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.  The story is told from the perspective of a young woman named Merricat Blackwood.  So far all I know is that the Blackwood family are decidedly unpopular in the small town, for some mysterious reason.  This is my second book by Shirley Jackson.  I absolutely loved The Haunting of Hill House.  I plan to re-read it again someday, and would highly recommend it for spooky season reading.

I have been distressed by the loss of Open Library and Internet Archive this week, as I'm sure many readers are.  How can I read my York Mystery Plays and my Mircea Eliade??  Hopefully both will be back online soon.

COMMONPLACE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone." - C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

ART OF THE WEEK

Landscape with Grave, Coffin, and Owl by Caspar David Friedrich, ca 1836

Something for Halloween season!  The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich is best known for his landscapes of mist, craggy mountains, blasted trees, and Gothic ruins.  He sought to experience the sublime in the contemplation of nature.  Full of symbolism and sometimes religious mysticism, his art sought to evoke an emotional response in the viewer.  Several of his works explore themes of mortality, the transience of human endeavors, and the endurance of nature, as in this sepia drawing from 1836.  An owl, long associated with wisdom and death, directly confronts the viewer and serves as a living memento mori, a pale moon rising above his horns like a ghostly crown or halo - or a rising spirit, as birds have deep associations with Spirit and spirit-flight, as well as the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.  No human being is visible in the drawing; we can only infer human presence by the coffin and the discarded tools of the gravediggers.  In the foreground grow two thistles, known for their wild beauty and hardiness: nature endures when man's spirit has flown.

The History of Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia."

So begins The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, a short philosophical novel written by Samuel Johnson in 1759.  Dr. Johnson is perhaps best known today for being the subject of the lengthy classic biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, written by the devoted Boswell.  He was, in fact. an eminent man of letters, having written poetry, plays, essays, sermons, biographies, a travel book about the western islands of Scotland, and a Dictionary of the English Language.  His reputation loomed large over the field of English letters for decades, and allusions to him in literature abound.  Even if still known by reputation, readers of his work seem to have diminished.  Truthfully, I'm not sure if Rasselas would have been on my radar had it not been mentioned by Charlotte Mason, and in turn found its way onto the booklists of Ambleside Online.  I've known about Johnson for many years; I haven't read Johnson until now.

Attempting to approach reading Rasselas as one would a conventional novel is likely going to lead to confusion and possibly disappointment.  Sometimes referred to as a moral fable or philosophical romance,  Rasselas may be best considered as an apologue: "a short fable or allegorical story, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for some moral doctrine or to convey some useful lesson."  In an apologue, the narrative details and characters are subordinate to the moral truth the author wants to convey.  Some scholars don't like to call Rasselas a "novel" at all.  Once we understand all this, we're in a better position to appreciate Rasselas and what Dr. Johnson was trying to do with this book.

How should we live?  What mode of life will foster happiness?  These are the fundamental human questions at the heart of Rasselas' quest.  Rasselas' story begins when he is a young man, a wealthy Prince of Abyssinia, living a sequestered life in Happy Valley, where "all the diversities of the world were brought together, the blessings of nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded."  Life is devoted to pleasure and amusement, delicacies and comforts. "Every art was practised to make them pleased with their own condition."  Happy Valley is surrounded by a mountain fastness, and communication with the outside world is barred by an iron gate, only to be opened once a year for an eight-day festival. "Thus every year produced new scenes of delight, and new competitors for imprisonment."    This is not the only time Happy Valley is likened to a prison.  This Pleasure Garden is a False Eden, a bubble of artificial happiness which depends on shutting out the miseries of the world and keeping its residents in ignorance.  Ignorance is bliss - or is it?

Rasselas feels a sense of discontent, a longing for more, and a curiosity about the wider world.  "Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification; or he has some desire distinct from sense, which must be satisfied before he can be happy," he muses.  He befriends Imlac, a poet and engineer who has come to Happy Valley from the outside world during one of the festivals.  The two plot their escape, and tunnel their way upwards and outwards, accompanied by Rasseslas' sister Nekayah and her maid Pekuah.  

The quest begins, and adventures follow, with each short chapter encapsulating some mode or station in life to be evaluated.  Rasselas has told us: "I am resolved to judge with mine own eyes of the various conditions of men, and then to make deliberately my choice of life.”  The choice of life is a phrase which recurs throughout the book.  We meet Epicureans, Stoics, the wealthy, the poor.  We muse about the life lived according to nature, and the life pastoral.  We discuss the merits of marriage and the life of solitude.  Does youth afford the greatest happiness?  Is old age free from vexation?  

The final destination of their travels is the catacombs near Cairo.  They descend and wander in labyrinthine subterraneous passages, discoursing on the nature of the soul.  Confronted with mortality, their thoughts turn to the shortness of their present state.  Is this endless searching after the choice of life really profitable?  “To me,” said the Princess, “the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity.”  In the end, they determine to return home to Abyssinia.  Perhaps the most important sentence in the book was spoken by our poet-engineer: “It seems to me,” said Imlac, “that while you are making the choice of life you neglect to live."

Since some refer to Rasselas as a "philosophical romance," I wanted to consider the romance elements of the story, so I turned to The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance by Northrop Frye.  Frye tells us that ascent and descent are the primary narrative movements in literature.  In the beginning of Rasselas, we have an ascent from a lower world when Rasselas & co. tunnel upwards out of the prison of Happy Valley.  Frye points out that "the lower world is sometimes a world of cruelty and imprisonment; sometimes an oracular cave."  In Rasselas we do have this prison imagery, and a sense of an enclosed space that must be tunneled out of.  Frye says, "We found that in descent narratives the central image is that of metamorphosis, the freezing of something human and conscious into an animal or plant or inanimate object.  Ascent themes introduce us to the opposite kind of metamorphosis, the growing of identity through the casting off of whatever conceals or frustrates it.  The simplest form of such ascending metamorphosis is the removal of enchantment, in which an animal disguise or something parallel is replaced by the original human form."  The inhabitants of Happy Valley are under a sort of enchantment.  Rasselas makes several comparisons of his own state to those of the beasts there, and while he sees certain similarities, he ultimately concludes that he is something more than they are.  He goes on an identity quest.  For when he seeks to make his choice of life, when he wonders how man should live, the true underlying question is not only Who am I? but What is man?  When the group visits the catacombs, this is a descent into the underworld.  Like the shades in Classical Hades, the bones of the dead in the catacombs impart their own wisdom:  Man is a mortal creature whose earthly time is limited.  His physical body will decay, but his immortal soul is eternal.  The group return to their homeland, their quest complete.

The Pilgrim's Procrastination: My Journey with John Bunyan

I started The Pilgrim's Progress months ago.  My first encounter with it was way back in high school, when we were given an excerpt to read in a British Literature class.  I was not enamoured of it, and even though one finds allusions and references to it in literature from the seventeenth century to the present, I thought I might well give it a miss.  The turning point for me came when I learned that C.S. Lewis' earliest novel was called The Pilgrim's Regress.  The nod to Bunyan was obvious.  Since it is one of my life goals to read everything by Lewis that I possibly can, I thought I should probably familiarize myself with The Pilgrim's Progress to enhance my understanding of Lewis' book.  Some years went by.  I acquired a copy of The Pilgrim's Regress.  A couple more years went by.  I acquired a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress.  A couple more years went by.  This summer I bit the bullet and started reading.

I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.  Simply put, it is an allegory of the journey of the soul to God.  The whole book is framed as a dream of the narrator - who asserts himself occasionally to remind us that he saw these things in his dream.  Perhaps this fits into the tradition of spiritual wisdom coming to people in dreams.  The main character, Christian, is an Everyman figure: he is there to represent all Christians, rather than to serve as a developed character in his own right.  Christian departs from his hometown, the City of Destruction, leaving his family behind, and embarks on a journey to the Celestial City (representative of heaven, the soul's final destination).  Christian carries a burden on his back, symbolizing the weight of sin.  His journey is long and arduous.  All along the way he encounters various obstacles, trials, and missteps - often represented by allegorical geographical features with fabulous names like the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle.  Sometimes he must battle adversaries, such as the fiend Apollyon and the Giant Despair.

Christian Reading in His Book, William Blake, 1820's

Perhaps the most famous stop on Christian's itinerary is the not-so-delightful village of Vanity Fair, which lent its name to William Makepeace Thackeray's celebrated Victorian novel.

In the end, Christian does reach the Celestial City.  And it's a good ending.  Which is why it's too bad that Bunyan felt the need to write a sequel.  The Second Part of The Pilgrim's Progress concerns the journey of Christian's wife - called Christiana - and their four sons.  Christiana has decided it's a good idea to leave the City of Destruction after all, and follow after her husband.  This is where I slowed down in my own journey through the book.  Though not entirely without interest, I'm not sure that Part 2 trods enough new ground to justify itself, nor that it quite lives up to Part 1.

Bunyan's purpose in writing the book was to teach Christians to see the world itself as an allegory: to learn to see the spiritual realities (and consequences) that lie behind life's trials and pleasures.  Though his allegorical style might be a bit heavy-handed and unsophisticated for some, I genuinely enjoyed it.  Whereas I am an Anglican and Bunyan was a Calvinist Dissenter, we do not see eye to eye about many things - that being said, I still found spiritual profit in this book, and I understand why it has won the hearts of so many Christians.  And it's a good story.  I suspect that Bunyan profited more than he knew from reading those "popular stories" in the chap-books when he was an unconverted youth.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is considered the first Gothic novel.  It was first published on Christmas Eve 1764, in the guise of ancient manuscript, "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and claimed to have been printed in Naples in 1529 (though undoubtedly composed at some earlier date).  Walpole kept his own identity a secret, even adopting a pseudonym for the personage of the translator of this ancient Italian work: William Marshal, Gent.  Walpole went a step further with this fabricated air of authenticity, suggesting that while "the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth.  The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle."  

Undoubtedly.  But the castle in question was not a crumbling stronghold in southern Italy, but a villa in Twickenham on the outskirts of London called Strawberry Hill, which Walpole had purchased in 1747.  Strawberry Hill was an ordinary country cottage at this point, a nice enough place, but lacking in the requisite "gloomth" to suit Walpole's tastes.  He spent the next 25 years adding turrets, towers, cloisters, pointed arches, stained glass, and finials, transforming the house into a Gothic castle in miniature.  Walpole now had a fitting backdrop for his eccentric antiquarian collections and his medieval imagination.

The Castle of Otranto had its dark genesis in a dream of its author, steeped as he was in this atmosphere of medieval Romance and Gothic architecture:

"I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.  In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.  The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it..."

The imaginative background of Otranto is a Gothic story in itself.  Its publishing history gave us the trope of the "found manuscript," it was composed in a Gothic revival "castle," its ghostly armored giant came to the author in a dream.  

Medieval Romance was out of favor in the neoclassical 18th century.  Anything medieval was considered barbaric and uncouth by the aesthetic standards of the time.  We see the first stirrings of Romanticism in the "Gothic Revival" - a sort of pre-Romanticism, if you will, that will lead us on to the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Byron, and the Shelleys.  But that day was not yet come when Walpole first published The Castle of Otranto - he was helping to create this new movement in literature and the arts.  Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry on the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful had appeared in 1757 (seven years before Otranto).  Burke's new twist on the concept of the sublime  divorced it from mere classical notions of beauty instilling pleasure.  Burke maintained that awe and a sense of horror could also evoke a pleasurable emotional response - as long as the horror concerned was fictitious.  And so we add another ingredient to the simmering cauldron of Gothic literature.  Eye of newt, toe of frog, Burke's sublime, neo-medieval architecture... The Castle of Otranto is taking shape in the rising vapors.

Along with lizard's leg and howlet's wing, we must not forget to toss the plays of William Shakespeare into the cauldron.  Consider the witchcraft present in Macbeth, the chanting and prophecies of the three Weird Sisters, the omens, the dramatic weather reflecting dark deeds.  Think of the ghost in Hamlet.  Think of ancient kings and castle settings, revenge, murder, and high dramatic style.  Shakespearean elements abound in The Castle of Otranto - Walpole explicitly acknowledges his debt to the Bard in the preface to the second edition.  Even the five chapter structure of the novel echoes the five acts of a Shakespearean drama.

This post has not even touched on the plot of the novel in question - rather, its focus has been on setting the scene and the building up of a Gothic atmosphere, which I believe are crucial to the enjoyment of the book.  It can't be read like a modern novel with well-developed characters.  It isn't that sort of book.  It reads like a fast-paced drama peopled with stock characters who speak in elevated style, as one would find in the theater.  In Walpole's story, he sought to blend the imaginative elements of the medieval romance with the more naturalistic touches of the modern novel: and thus, the Gothic genre was born.  This may not be the best Gothic novel, but it was the first.  If we suspend our disbelief, spectres, prophecies, trapdoors, maidens in distress, dark secrets, and subterraneous passages await.   

Edited to add: My review of the 1977 short film version of The Castle of Otranto can be found HERE.