The Monk is a notorious novel, especially considering that its author, Matthew Gregory Lewis, was only 19 years old and a member of the British Parliament when it was published. It is a novel unlike anything England had seen before its publication in 1796. Sinister and disturbing, it revolutionized Gothic literature with its lurid tone and frank discussion of taboo subjects: witchcraft, sex, anticlericalism, murder, incest, the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, and Satanism.

Besides presenting the reader with a parade of all manner of perversions on the pages of The Monk, it also contained anti-Christian arguments worthy of Nietzsche, such as the notion that 'even in the annals of a brothel it is difficult to find a greater selection of obscene expressions than in Holy Scripture.'