Even weirder than the Gothic excesses of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, even wilder than Matthew Lewis' The Monk, Beckford's Vathek remains the most extreme example of English 18th century literature, a crawling meditatoin on the trasngressions of the depraved. Witches, demons, human sacrifices and other spectral horrors mark the progress of Vathek, ninth caliph of the Abassides, on his pilgrimage to the underworld, where his sins and damnations flower into eternal torture.