Dennis Jasper. [Pseudonym Charles Robert Maturin] Murphy

Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio. A Romance

      The author's first book. From his beginnings as a Gothic novelist, Maturin was addicted to ultra-complicated plots whose dramatic commotion rivals the tangled tragedies of blood of the Elizabethan playwrights, and Jacobean melodramatists - Marlowe, Tourneur, Webster, and Chapman. The infinitely elaborate trappings of the Elizabethan revenge play seem to serve Maturin as a model for Montorio... To supplement the revenge plot, there is also plenty of monastic and inquisitional atrocity and a shrill style of poetic horror that will later become central in Melmoth the Wanderer. - Tymn (ed), Horror Literature 1-242. A remarkable novel, superior even to Melmoth the Wanderer in atmosphere and color, though very difficult to follow. - Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 1133. Barron (ed), Horror Literature 1-62. Bleiler (ed), Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, p. 164. Sullivan (ed), The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, p. 285. Summers, A Gothic Bibliog [Publisher: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme]