The Oxford King cover does not advance a visual claim to literary respectability for King or Lewis but instead mimics mass-market horror covers by best-selling authors like Dean Koontz and King himself, pandering to fans of these books. It doesn’t follow all the visual conventions of that genre of covers, like making the author’s name larger than the title, but if it were a paperback it would not look out of place at a supermarket or airport. The Oxford King cover courts fans of modern horror by visually suggesting that Lewis’s eighteenth-century novel is like King’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century ones. King’s name appears prominently, set above Lewis’s and in a slightly larger font despite its modestly tighter kerning. The font of King’s name resembles the ones on the covers of his own novels. Even more obviously, the image and design of the Oxford edition recall several editions of King’s books. Comparing the cover of the Oxford King Monk with editions of King’s popular novels, I noticed similar color schemes and recurring images of silhouettes or otherwise indistinct figures and open doorways, glowing lights, and long shadows. The jacket designer Oxford recruited for the King edition, David Stevenson, works at Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House that publishes fantasy and science fiction books. He has designed covers for massively successful Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks novels,hydroponic gutter making him an expert at packaging genre fiction of the sort that seems incompatible with Oxford’s brand.

Oxford put a great deal of effort into visually replicating a mass-market horror novel, even making this hardcover almost exactly the size of a typical $7.99 paperback. Yet the hardcover format and Oxford World’s Classic label show that Oxford insisted upon clinging to a modicum of prestige that, in this context, seems embarrassingly awkward. I will discuss a similar kind of awkwardness in the next section, on critical responses. For some scholars, the fact that Oxford University Press likened Matthew Lewis to Stephen King would probably be disturbing in its blurring of distinctions, given the pains they’ve taken to argue for the correct way to categorize The Monk, often as against its more vulgar counterparts. For instance, Coral Ann Howells, in her study from 1978, writes that Lewis “plays with certain predictable responses in his readers, sometimes exploiting Gothic convention when he wants sensationalism and horrific effects and sometimes drawing attention to their artificiality through comic burlesque,” constructing the author as a clever manipulator of unsophisticated conventions of feeling.Quoting the full title of the sensational, plot-spoiling bluebook from 1818 that I mentioned above, she admits that its “skeletal account captures the emphasis on sex and violence that we find in the original,” but she objects that “by its sheer crudity of language it transforms The Monk into a piece of lurid Gothic pornography, totally neglecting the narrative artifice of the novel together with its wit and range of tone.”

It is difficult to see what it is about the language of the title that Howell finds crude—the summary even euphemistically calls Ambrosio’s vicious rape of Antonia “his wicked machinations.” The title’s alleged lack of refinement, then, is perhaps only evident in the fact that it alludes to the scandalous aspects of Lewis’s plot without suggesting that the real draw is the literary craft. Howells argues that the erotic passages deserve attention for their “variations on the theme of sexual disaster,” and she implies that any reader who fails to be excited by Lewis’s literary skill above all is missing the point of the novelTwenty years later, James Watt argues that The Monk’s early critics mistook it for the kind of “mass-produced uniformity that Lewis so clearly defined his work against” and that rather than being an exemplar of gothic fiction, it is an anti-gothic work.Instead of allowing that The Monk can be pleasure reading, some scholars dispute its kinship with titillating, plot-driven, conventional gothic fiction, even if that means redefining those terms and invalidating the responses of other readers. Whether amateur critics are aware that The Monk’s status has been contested or not, they value its stimulation over its distinction. Perhaps because they judge the novel to be a classic, several online reviewers consider it in terms of high school assigned reading and sound relieved that it is not the abstracted canonical work that many of its editions present it as. One Goodreads reviewer writes, “It was written in the era of the great classics, but this one is never going to be taught in schools,” and another laments, “Seriously high school kids would have loved the hell out of this and seek to read more classics were they not confined to snoring tomes like . . . idk, A scarlet letter?”When amateur critics show awareness of scornful attitudes toward The Monk, they tend to counter them with their own scorn for academic snobbery.

One describes scholars who write disdainful introductions to gothic fiction as “act[ing] as if they’ve been forced to become circus geeks, biting the heads off chickens for booze.”34 Another writes that the scholar who introduces her edition “totally missed the point,” arguing that the novel is not “an Exploration of the Fall of a Virtuous Man, and all that kind of crap” but rather a “rousing good read” that was “written to entertain – and titillate.”They write as if they believe they understand The Monk better than academic readers, which is reasonable considering that much of the novel’s scholarly marketing and reception has obscured or minimized the sensational qualities that are readily apparent in the text. In general, amateur reviewers seem to enjoy The Monk more than other gothic novels of its era, perhaps because Oxford’s modern-horror marketing, though awkward, makes an argument for the similarity of the works of Stephen King and Matthew Lewis that actually has substance. It is impossible to tell how many amateur reviewers came to The Monk through the Oxford King edition, or through the Valancourt Books edition that republished King’s introduction after the Oxford version went out of print, or through Goodreads lists of books recommended for fans of Stephen King’s work. That said, many online reviewers of The Monk seem unprepared for an eighteenth-century novel but nevertheless receptive, in ways that we could expect of King enthusiasts. Several reviewers complain about The Monk’s old-fashioned capitalization and phrasing but still find it engrossing, and a handful mention their appreciation of King in their praise of Lewis’s novel. One Goodreads reviewer who notes King’s admiration for the novel gives it five stars, writing, “With the 18th century dialect and coinage it was slow reading at first, but it didn’t take long for me to soon be absorbed in the plot, anxious and worried for the victims while shocked by the behavior of the villains. This book will have readers glued to the pages and losing track of time.”This sympathetic engagement is typical of many of the reviews I read, as are less fine feelings: one amateur critic writes that on first reading the novel, “my hair rose perpendicularly from my scalp and tingles spread across my nether regions.”Scholars who worked to distinguish The Monk from less sophisticated gothic fiction would probably be dismayed to learn that readers who pick it up today often compare it not only to Stephen King novels but also to even less prestigious works. The same Goodreads reviewer who recalls The Monk’s effect on his nether regions also advertises the novel as “the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Gothic novels which will unjade the most jaded,”hydroponic nft channel and a reviewer on LibraryThing observes, “This book is 18th century smut. It’s the Janet Evanovich of their time.”38 These amateur critics both gave the novel four stars out of five, and though they seem aware that comparing it to a slasher film or the bestsellers of a romance writer will be perceived as an insult to its quality, they also use these comparisons as recommendations, showing receptivity to the kind of thrills these low-status works offer.

Perhaps because of the “professional suspicion” Rita Felski describes as the dominant critical mood of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scholars phrase their responses to The Monk much more carefully than these amateur critics do, even when they champion pleasure reading. Devendra Varma, one of the early scholarly advocates for gothic fiction, performs a typical balancing act of criticism and commendation when appraising Lewis’s work: “His inflamed imagination and violent exaggeration of emotion suggest adolescence, yet he thrills his readers and makes their flesh creep. This author of remarkable talent makes horrors come crowding thick upon us, and often crudely resorts to the physically horrible . . . Yet, so great is the interest of his unadorned narrative, with its quick succession of events, that such bold exaggeration seems only fitting.”In this assessment, Varma rapidly alternates between acknowledging perceived defects and meting out praise while using terms that distance him from his opinions and responses . But like amateur critics, he finds value in Lewis’s sensational, gripping writing, and he includes himself in the feelings he describes with “we.” Though there have been vast changes in scholarly attitudes toward popular fiction since 1957, most scholars still tread carefully on this topic. As recently as 2012, Victoria Nelson recalls her first encounter with The Monk in a first-person narrative without modulating her younger self’s pleasure, but she includes details that protect her status as a serious academic. She writes that as a Berkeley undergraduate, instead of researching Chaucer for her senior honors thesis, she spent a day sitting on the floor in one of the school libraries “enthralled by this salacious tale of lustful monks, evil abbesses, complaisant nuns, and a baby’s corpse decaying in an underground crypt. I gulped down its 400-odd pages in one go, staggering out of the stacks a few head-spinning hours later stiff and disoriented but eager for more.”Nelson describes her enjoyment of this plot-driven, dramatic work without shame, and yet she distances herself from that enjoyment by recounting this scene from her youth, and she precludes any doubts about her sophistication by mentioning her prestigious university, her impressive academic standing, and her knowledge of medieval literature. Even the university library setting and her account of reading four hundred pages in only a few hours attest to her scholarly credibility. Scholars of popular literature today can admit to enjoying absorbing plots and sensations without implicating themselves as long as they qualify their enjoyment with critical distance, but as I will show in the following section, this negotiation between sensational absorption and critical distance can sometimes result in uncomfortable contortions—contortions that I will offer an alternative to in the final sections of this chapter.The uncomfortable situation of being a scholar who writes about a novel like The Monk is not easily resolved. The hypercritical mode of many recent scholars that Felski identifies may limit the range of feelings we can express about texts, but it also often emerges from a desire to attend to the ways our engagement with texts can have negative social implications. Amateur critics have no professional mandate to censure socially objectionable portrayals in fiction, and the freedom with which some of them praise the shocking aspects of The Monk can itself seem shocking. For example, in a Goodreads review, after citing Coleridge and considering how the novel portrays the complexity of evil, an amateur critic blithely declares, “Antonia is so gullible you feel she deserves all she gets and more.” Good background information, thoughtful meditations on themes, and approvals of the depiction of the rape and murder of a pious young woman are not incompatible in amateur reviews.Statements like this one are also not limited to amateur critics, as King expresses similar sentiments in his introduction to the Oxford edition of The Monk. King endorses Lewis’s sympathetic attitude toward his rapist character as that of “a young man with a healthy sex drive” and his comic depiction of a governess’s kidnapping as “exactly what we want” in its “black humor.”Because their reputation is not at stake in the same way it is for scholars, King and amateur reviewers can sometimes appear to be remarkably comfortable with expressing enjoyment of The Monk’s least respectable qualities.