 first published in 1764. It's described as the first gothic novel. Even after reading more about that, I'm not sure what that means. Anyway, I'm reviewing it here because it's just so weird. On page one, it reveals a family prophecy that the castle and lordship of Altranto should pass from the present family whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it. And then on page two, a giant black helmet a hundred times the size of a normal human head crashes down into the castle courtyard from the sky. A number of hilariously weird things like that happen throughout the story. And it's not very long. It's only four chapters. It's deliberately written in the style of a Shakespearean tragedy slash drama. And it looks like Walpole was doing that out of respect for Shakespeare's work, but I read it as a satire of Shakespeare. And I thought it was very entertaining. Like I was saying before, this is a very short book. Really not a novel at all. Just four chapters. This edition, as thin as it is, contains 36 pages of introductory material. And then there's a preface to the first edition by Walpole and a preface to the second edition by Walpole. So the book doesn't actually start until like a quarter of a way through. And then afterwards, there's pages and pages of explanatory notes and then lists of other books in this series. So really, the book is only this long. I found it greatly entertaining. And like I said before, I read it as a satire of Shakespeare and thought it was quite funny. One of the quirks of these early novels is how they don't use the punctuation norms that we're used to today. Like here at the beginning of chapter two, there's a paragraph break on the first page, but there's not another paragraph break until page 46. That's seven pages without a paragraph break. There's plenty of dialogue and plenty of action going on. And he uses no quotation marks. But even so, it's easy enough to follow. Just a quick little piece of weird fiction history that I thought was worth talking about.