The Orient itself is framed as a monstrous landscape in Gothic horror.

Evidence

Vathek is “a work of the fantastic.” Its features include a coal-skinned demon named “the Indian,” a homicidal, queer Arab villain, skies streaked with blood, corpses emerging from the earth, a traveling Tower of Babel, magic slippers, and the mass murder of 50 naked boys. Vathek takes place in the Orient, a landscape filled with horrors from the earth to the sky. In a graveyard, ghouls rise up from the earth—“a hollow noise was heard in the earth; the surface shoved up into heaps; and the ghouls, on all sides, protruded their noses to inhale the effluvia, which the carcasses of the woodmen began to emit.” In another scene, the sultan Vathek looks up to see that the blue sky has become “streaked over with streams of blood, which reached from the valley even to the city of Samarah.” Vathek is a text populated with frights: “Vathek’s terrible optic, which dealt death and confusion all about him, the giaour [the Indian] as football, the giaour as insatiable quaffer of the blood of children, the dizzy heights of the tower of Carathis, and the olfactory appeal of the pyre thereon composed of stale mummies and loyal servants.” Reflecting a pattern common to many Gothic horror tales, including Dracula, the nightmarish environment in this text functions as a character, another monster in the story. In Beckford’s tale, the other two prominent monsters are Vathek and the Indian. Vathek’s mother is also evil (remember, most Gothic horror texts have a malevolent woman), but she plays a secondary role in the story. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Direct feedstock for the reader’s own inquiry: the ‘Orient as character/landscape-monster’ device is the spatial extension of the Muslim-monster figure they are tracking across figures.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘landscape as monster’ reverses the Gothic’s European haunted-house convention onto the Orient, doing ideological work by making horror topographical.