The gothic revival carries on with The Monk by Matthew Lewis (1796)

So melodramatic! But also very richly textured, with various little odds of folklore thrown in, such as a spectral nun and the wandering nun, various apposite folktales in the form of poems and a wildly fraught dual storyline that somehow manages to converge at the very last.

What I learned: if two women in a Gothic novel love the hero, one of them is going to die terribly at the hands of the villain.

Also: don't deal with the devil unless you've thought out your list of demands beforehand. Fool!