The Castle of Otranto

A giant helmet falls out of the sky and crushes the heir on his wedding day, and the castle spends the rest of the book refusing to let a usurping family keep it. Walpole published it as a translation of a medieval Italian manuscript, and admitted the hoax only when it succeeded. Everything later called Gothic - the vaults, the portrait that moves, the doomed lineage - starts here. Fifty-three plates by Goya and Fuseli, from cudgel fights to a radiant figure beset by dark spirits, give the novel's vaults and doomed lineage their proper weather.