Café de Nuit

Zilfer wrote:

thekristhomas wrote:Kinda OT but a thought led to a thought.

There's something of the Miss Haversham about Strahd in this set up, raising a beautiful child for his own dark purposes while wedding cake moulders in the other room...

had to do some research to understand what you were meaning there. I had never heard of "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens before. Sad story it seems.

Yeah sorry, I was trying to think of Gothic tales that had something of this setup, the evil scheming Guardian, the innocent child being warped by her upbringing etc. and was reminded of this, the early sections of which promised a more Gothic tale than the rest of the book delivered sadly (IMHO). I can't help feeling there's a really obvious one that I'm missing

The closest I can think of are not Gothic novels in that sense: Lolita and The Palace of Love from Jack Vance's Demon Princes series.