Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In the incense-clouded churches of a superstitious Madrid, one man is worshipped almost as a saint: Ambrosio, the abbot of the Capuchins, whose sermons hold the whole city spellbound and whose virtue is believed to be beyond temptation. Yet within his own abbey walls a secret is waiting — the young novice Rosario is not what he seems — and once the holy man’s pride is touched, the long, terrible slide begins. So opens the most notorious novel of the English Gothic: a tale of forbidden desire, dark bargains, and a fall from grace that shook its own age.

Matthew Gregory Lewis wrote The Monk in a matter of weeks, before he was twenty, and it made him famous and infamous at a stroke. Alongside Ambrosio’s ruin runs a second story — the wronged nun Agnes, her devoted Raymond, and the ghostly legend of the Bleeding Nun of Castle Lindenberg — until the two strands close together in the vaults beneath the convent of St. Clare. It is a book of moonlit gardens and tolling bells, of sorcery and storm, and of a question that outlasts its shocks: how the most exalted virtue, once flattered, can hollow itself into something else.

This is a work of high Gothic melodrama, and this edition renders its darkness the way the greatest illustrators of the age did — by shadow, symbol, and suggestion, never by display. Read it for its candlelit dread and its headlong storytelling, and for the terrible sympathy it spares even for the damned.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, a map of Gothic Madrid and its haunted castle, and the great scenes of the tale; and as you read, the story unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock along the way, each gathering together the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page, and enter the Church of the Capuchins as the abbey bell tolls.