The Castle of Otranto, first published in 1764, is often credited with being the first Gothic novel, a literary genre that would become extremely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Purporting to be based on a (fictitious) sixteenth-century manuscript containing a mediaeval story about spooky goings - on in an Italian castle, it opens with the death of the heir of the castle of Otrantro, on both his wedding-day and his birthday, crushed by an immense helmet. It is a sensational and suspenseful story (of the type parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey) complete with sorcery, an underground passage, a ghost, an enormous sword, a cave in a forest, a masked knight, a storm, unearthly groaning, a statue dripping blood and a spectral skeleton.