Cafe de Nuit

I'd guess Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

There are several books she parodies, but I think the main ones would belong to Ann Radcliffe?

Correctomundo, you evil genius, you!

You're up.

Here goes the next one.

Two books in the Gothic tradition, both from the XIXth century, share one same character in their title and were written by authors of different nationalities. What are these books?

So, no takers?

Excellent challenge, my friend. Surely you refer to SILAS MARNER by Englishwoman Mary Ann Evans (a.k.a. George Eliot) and UNCLE SILAS by the Irishman Sheridan Le Fanu!

I shall return later with a question to match your genius!

Erm... well... no, that was not the ones I meant, but I won't complain. Second time I pose a question with more than one possible answer, so I should have learned by now.

The answer I sought was:

Melmoth, the Wanderer, considered one of the highest novels of the gothic, by Charles Maturin, Irish.

And Melmoth Reconciled, by Honoré de Balzac, French.
And it's actually about the same character.

Well, I'm waiting for the next question

It's been a week since the last post. Is there still anyone interested in this game?

What's the question now?

1. What is the reason the arriving knights in Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" do not talk all along until they are in Manfred's chamber?

2. What is arguably the first Gothic dungeon - meaning a maze where the hero has to enter to prove his worth?

3. The Batman comics, even in 1939, were right away understood as an allusion to several tales of horror and Gothic. One was very obvious, and also kind of parodied in the earliest "Prince Valiant" strips of that time. Which one would that be? (If you can name the movie, you're already very good.)

2. I have a vague impression it would be 'The Monk' by Matthew Lewis, but I can not be sure.

No, it's even a bit earlier, but also by a prominent author.

If I'm reading it right, it's because they don't want to reveal that one of them is actually Frederic, a rival nobleman, in front of the large crowd in the courtyard. Perhaps Frederic doesn't trust the bulk of his entourage to be able to keep a secret, so only the other two knights knew he'd come into the castle himself, anonymous in armor and helmet?

He's also the father of Isabella, the woman Manfred wants to marry. I guess she might be able to identify him if any of them spoke.

Actually, this was a trap. There is no reason AT ALL why they remain awfully silent.

The book itself is more than sketchy, and it's the one scene where things become outright hillarious.

Walpole claimed to have written it as a phantasmagoria, from his own nightmare. That might explain it; however, the book is simply not coherent.

3. Google is your friend, they say. Let's see if it was my friend this time.
That would be The Bat, probably the 1926 film, although there is a play from 1920 on which it is based. It features a caped killer known as bat that kills people in an old mansion, one by one. He taunts them first with a kind of bat-signal. There's also a 1930 film based on the same story, The Bat Whispers.

2. Still at a loss here. There don't seem to be that many great writers before 1796, so I'm going to bet on
a) Castle of Otranto itself, there were a few secret passages there
b) The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (my first bet, since it is in the right timeframe, it is the arguably most important writer of the time, and it has enough of a castle to provide for a maze)
c) The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (in desperation, really)