Shocker.

Castle of Otranto is a shock to the system.  It is an unpredictable, sporadic and, sometimes, grating read. It is not a bad novel, just jarring when first encountered. The language, the structure, the plot, and the characters all contribute to interrupting the traditional and familiar flow of how a story should proceed. The language is awkward to adjust to at first, there’s a careful eloquence in the way the characters speak but it lacks the grace of what we’re used to hearing. The diction of the characters is dark and foreboding and their syntax is unusual – their sentence structures don’t follow a pattern that we use to speak in the modern day and it’s akin but not quite the language of the Romantic movement; it lacks the flowery presentation that characterizes it. This is to be expected, of course, as it is a Gothic work and not a Romantic one, and one of the telling features that categorizes it as such is in the language.

The structure is also somewhat distressing at first. The most punctuation the reader is offered is the most basic – periods, hyphens, and commas. It forces the events of the story to run together in a chaotic and inseparable fashion. It creates confusion, frustration, and joins everything together like a complicated and ugly web so that even the most unremarkable events contribute to the overarching plot, even if their purpose is just to fluster the audience. Similarly, the plot is seemingly random and unpleasant – it’s unpredictable and, of course, chaotic. The melodrama of the characters in their despair also contributes to making the novel an awkward read as everything seems over the top and unnecessary. But that is, of course, the point.

Castle of Otranto is not meant to be fun, it is purposely chaotic to truly invite the reader into the world of the story.