That book about the acquaintance-rape of a drugged underage girl?
And more:
In 1796, a 20-year-old Oxford University graduate named Matthew Lewis published ''The Monk,'' a Gothic shocker unlike anything English society had ever seen. The novel told a lurid tale of sex and murder involving a Roman Catholic priest: Ambrosio, the revered head of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, rapes and stabs Antonia, a local beauty of noble descent, in the crypt of the convent next door. The macabre nature of his crime is conveyed in graphic detail. The priest drugs her with an opiate so powerful that she is presumed dead and carted off in a coffin to the crypt, where, as soon as she revives, he forces himself on her and then finishes her off with two dagger blows to the heart. In an earlier fit of lustful frenzy, he also strangles her mother.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/books/shelf-life-in-those-days-too-blood-and-sex-could-make-a-best-seller.htmlMatthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) marked a turning point in the history of Gothic literature. With its emphasis firmly on the horrific and the shocking, the book moved Gothic away from the gentle terrors of earlier authors such as Horace Walpole and, instead, confronted readers with an onslaught of horror in the form of spectral bleeding nuns, mob violence, murder, sorcery and incest. Unsurprisingly the book met with outrage and condemnation from critics. Equally unsurprisingly it was hugely popular with the public.
With its twin themes of erotic obsession and the corrupting influence of power, The Monk deals with important issues and contains moments of impressive psychological insight. At heart, however, it remains a morality tale about one man’s fall from grace through greed, pride and lust. The edition shown here is a heavily abbreviated version of the novel published sometime around 1818. On the left Ambrosio, the monk of the title, signs his Faustian pact with the devil while, on the right, the entire plot of the book is summarised in lurid headings such as ‘Artifices of a Female Demon’; ‘Her Mother Whom He Murdered’; ‘Assassinates with a Dagger’ and, finally, ‘Most Ignominious Death’.
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewisOne of the most influential Gothic novels, The Monk is also a key text on the debate on the French Revolution, and it bears the stamp of other incendiary issues of the day, from gender roles to the depiction of sex and violence to slavery
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-monk-9780198704454"The Monk [by Matthew Lewis] was a black engine of sex and the supernatural that changed the genre--and the novel itself--forever. There has never been anything quite like it. At this writing, the book is over two hundred years old and still explosive."
-- Stephen King (2002)
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/The_Monk
