Xtreme gothic literature

Graveyard poetry flourished in the first half of the Eighteenth Century and continued the ground work which would eventually become the Gothic. The Graveyard school's principle poetic objects which became staples in Gothic literature, other than graves and churchyards, were night, ruins, death and ghosts. While reveling in the images of death and the horrors of the grave, the principle goal of the graveyard school was to glory in the spiritual end that the tomb represented by turning the trappings of death into objects of aesthetic appreciation. "Thrice welcome Death!/That after many a painful bleeding step/Conducts us to our Home, and lands us safe/On the long-wish'd for shore."*

The attractions of darkness are among the foremost characteristics of Gothic works. "They marked the limits necessary to the constitution of an enlightened world and delineated the limitiations of neoclassical perceptions. Darkness, metaphorically, threatened the light of reason with what it did not know. Gloom cast perceptions of formal order and unified design into obscurity; its uncertainty generated both a sense of mystery and passions and emotions alien to reason. Night gave free reign to imagination's unnatural and marvellous creatures, while ruins testified to a temporality that exceeded rational understanding and human finitude. These were the thoughts conjured up by Graveyard Poets."*

Several Graveyard poets are represented here but more work is required to bring these poets from the gloomy night of obscurity to the web. "Methinks I hear a voice begin"

Montague, Edward -- The Demon of Sicily: A Romance. 1807.

The equivalent of Lewis's Father Ambrosio is Father Bernardo, an arrogant and lustful priest who forms an alliance with a crafty demon in order to satisfy his desires. His concupiscence extends to the holy virgin herself and is repeatedly satisfied within the precincts of the monastery by the obligingly amorous nun, sister Agatha, a paradigm of Gothic nymphomania. Sister Agatha's salacious history comprises a second plot as she is an equal to Father Bernardo in her unchecked voluptuousness. When she is not violating her vows in other ways, she is busy ginving herself to any and all men and has been especially generous in this respect to the young cavalier, Ferdinando de Montalino. "The chapel of Santa Catherina beheld the guilty pair wantoning in the fulfilment of their wishes till the grey dawn made their long untrimmed lamps almost usless." Acting upon a taste for macabre theatrics, she has further enjoyed several passionate liaisons with Father Bernardo inside the burial grounds of the monastery. Caught between this vile pair is the innocent maiden, Angellina, as pure and desirable as her name. Her pathetic story forms the third plot strand. With her beloved, Lorenzo, she has come to the monastery seeking sanctuary from the lecherous designs of Sister Agatha's father. Goaded on by his demon of Sicily (actually a demon of sexuality), Bernardo seizes Angellina within the sanctum sanctorum, then descends with her to the foul vaults beneath the monastery. But cryptic copulation is narowly avertly when Abbot Ignazio interrupts Bernardo's rape and invites the Inquisition to investigate the activities of Bernardo and Agatha. As had Ambrosio, the arrested Bernardo and Agatha must answer to the Holy Office for their crimes. The public burning of Bernardo (Agatha takes poison to evade the stake) is one of the most sensationally revolting scenes in gothic literature, the demon having attended Bernardo's final agonies and announced that his rape victim had been his sister.
-- Frederick Frank, The First Gothics.