Written some years before the American Revolution by a Member of Parliament, it should come as no surprise that Horace Walpole's work lacks certain virtues that creative writing programs insist upon. The characters tend to be types rather than recognizable humans, the plot is silly on its face and moves along by coincidence after coincidence, and the conclusion is the most obvious kind of deus ex machina - almost literally, God comes down to settle everybody's hash. Having said all that, "The Castle Of Otranto" is a lot of fun and very influential.
Mind you, I have no idea whether Walpole intended this work to be fun. It's a fairly straight ahead ghost story involving a noble family and their long-ago sins. It reads today like a kind of mild-mannered Gothic tale, and indeed some call it the first Gothic novel, influencing Melmoth and Scott and that crowd.
On the other hand, Walpole also pulls off something usually considered a postmodern trick, one of my personal favorites - treating his fictional work as if it were real, found in a basement or ancient library. Here, the introduction tells us that the work that follows is a translation from an ancient manuscript in Italian, clearly a transcription of an even older story. It goes on to apologize for the fact that English cannot match the beauty of the original Italian, while at the same time deploring the author's need to include obviously nonsensical supernatural elements for verisimilitude, the lame attempt at a moral, and a few other criticisms. If this wasn't intended to be fun back in the day, it certainly is fun now.
Although, as I said, the characters tend to be types, they don't stay that way all the time. They do undergo changes, in the course of an engaging story, that surprisingly - Spoiler Alert! - does not have a completely happy ending. That's actually kind of a relief after many other Gothic novels, in all of which virtue is unfailingly rewarded. At least this work is different
Benshlomo says, Don't ignore work in genres you don't ordinarily like – they may surprise you.
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