The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole.
The aesthetics of the book shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music and the goth subculture.
The novel initiated a literary genre which would become extremely popular in the later 18th and early.
The novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since.
In the second edition, Walpole applied the word \'Gothic\' to the novel in the subtitle - "A Gothic Story".
It is generally regarded as the first gothic novel.
The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole