The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is great gothic.  It has everything: lightning and thunder; ghosts and virgins; machinating lords and virtuous unknowns who hide the bluest blood under peasant rags; caverns and hidden passages that lead to monasteries and refuge; blood and the promise of gore; and reconciliation before the specter of eternal damnation.  The ends are all tied up neatly at the conclusion, with at least one potentially happy couple and one exiled couple (I consider retirement to the monastic life to be exile).

The one thing missing from The Castle of Otranto is the time and space necessary to allow for my nerves to build up, my anxieties to grow, and my fears to take over.  Walpole gallops through his gothic invention (how do I even have the nerve to contest this wondrous work that gave birth to volumes of gothic perfection?) at an almost comedic pace.  All the exits and entrances reminded me at times of a farce, with mistaken identities and hidden alliances adding to the hilarity of the confusion. I found myself smiling more than cowering in the mind-spinning sequences of action and drama. The atmosphere of impending doom hovered but more like an insistent helicopter rather than an all-encompassing shadow of darkness and despair descending over the countryside.  I prefer my gothic slow, with the shadow of doom and despair descending slowly, taking everyone in its girth of evil down deeper and deeper into a hell from which only true faith or true love can offer salvation.

Why the hurry, Walpole sir? As later gothic greats demonstrated by their wild popularity (novels such as The Italian by Ann Radcliffe, Dracula by Bram Stoker and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo), readers are devoted and patient: give us some good interior and exterior and even subterranean shots; give us close-ups of the ladies both in their attitudes of devotion and of passion; give us the men getting drunk on alcohol, desire, or fear; then thunk us over the head with ghosts, revelations from the past, true identities revealed, and a path lined without glorious deeds to bring us up from the darkness and into the light.