Where to begin? Perhaps it is a dark and stormy night. Or perhaps the clouds hang oppressively in the heavens. Perhaps the moon is on the wane and the silent leaves are still in the shadow of the hill. To approach the subject of the gothic is to take a journey along a long, twisting road to an old dark house. Steeling yourself against the insufferable gloom, you approach the ancestral pile. Inside, Bram Stoker baits Lord Byron before the looming stone mantel, offering up his neck in exchange for eternity. Mary Shelley, all in black, rocks neurotically back and forth, cradling her dead child, cursing her living creation. The shrieks of Matthew Lewis, condemned forever to circle the walls at night, no longer bother Edgar Allan Poe, soaked in laudanum, whose devilish game of cards with Sheridan Le Fanu is nearly at an end, the virtue of his young cousin almost played out. Meantime the ghost of Horace Walpole ambles through the crooked corridors crying out that it was he who built this cursed place. “Stuff and nonsense”, says Ann Radcliffe, “I can explain it all…”