A Gothic novel is a pseudomedieval fiction story that is characterized by a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror and is often set in castles or monasteries. It emerged in 18th-century Romanticism, and its heyday was the 1790s, with such works as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are also Gothic novels. In the modern era, many novels and short stories by writers from the American South, including Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Colson Whitehead, and Donna Tartt, have notable Gothic elements.
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