Episode 108: The Monk

For Halloween 2023, we bring you one of the craziest novels of all time (or certainly of the eighteenth century). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a tale of horny Catholics – men and women, in the clergy and not – sexy nuns, ultraviolence, and, as Katie puts it, “dinosaurism.” See, Satan turns into a pterodactyl to open up a can of whoop-ass on the Monk. Based. Another extremely based thing that happens, this smokin’ lady monk named Matilda turns out to be a wizard, does a full-on black mass, AND DOMMES THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS HIMSELF. It’s trashy as hell, it’s metal af, and we’re talking all the classic gothic themes – sex, desire, critiques of power and patriarchy, and how eighteenth-century Britons are constitutionally incapable of being even slightly normal about the “Romish religion.”

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Nick Groom, but we kinda recommend the Penguin for the cover art alone, which really gets at the dinosaurism in question (it also has full frontal, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of The Monk). For more on the gothic and Lewis’s place within it, we highly recommend friend-of-the-pod Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, as well as Angela Wright’s chapter on Lewis and Ann Radcliffe in The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. I.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.