OMGGGGGGG.... I totally CANNOT believe that the author of this book was 19 YEARS OLD when he wrote this, and he wrote it under 10 WEEKS . This is a masterpiece!! A 18TH CENTURY GOTHIC GODDAMN MASTERPIECE!!! 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? (Sorry, Hawthorne I have never gotten used to you ). "The Monk" retells the stories of a monk who abandons his virtues to become perfidious. So engulfed with lust and horror that he went at length to sell his soul for the devil and commit most heinous crimes. I was at first expected to read some long and boring stories about theology and rambling monologues, but this book turned out to have EVERYTHING that made a novel awesome : romance, poetry, murder, death, kidnapping, evil schemes, satire, social commentary, rape, incest, ghost, demons, poison, secret underground entrances, a devil that throw a guy off a cliff, and FUCKING great PLOT TWISTS! I was so blown away at the end that I nearly ripped my hair off and sunk into irretrievable euphoria. Lewis's novel, with anti-Catholic sentiments influenced by the French Revolution, was actually banned in England when it first published but that only instigated more people to read it, albeit illicitly. Well, who cannot help but being enchanted by Lewis? Even Edgar A. Poe cited him as an inspiration for his short story "The Pit and The Pendulum."