The Monk
by Matthew Gregory Lewis
Narrated by Harry Hadden-Paton
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
A teenager wrote this in 1796, caused a national scandal, and Harry Hadden-Paton reads it like he's been waiting his whole career for something this depraved.
- Great if you want: Gothic excess, moral collapse, and lurid 18th-century atmosphere
- Listening experience: Dense and episodic; rewards patience across a long, dark runtime
- Narration: Hadden-Paton's crisp, aristocratic delivery sharpens every transgression
- Skip if: Sexual violence and religious horror are hard limits for you
About This Audiobook
Ambrosio is the most celebrated monk in Madrid, a man whose reputation for virtue has made him the object of near-worship from the city's faithful. When a young woman disguised as a novice enters his monastery and begins to erode his certainty, he finds himself in a descent that Matthew Lewis follows to its logical and horrifying conclusion. Written when Lewis was nineteen, The Monk established many of the conventions of Gothic horror and provided generations of writers a template for exploring the violence beneath sanctioned piety.
Harry Hadden-Paton narrates this 1796 classic with the theatrical authority it demands, treating Lewis's excesses as features rather than bugs and giving the novel's alternation between social comedy and genuine horror the range each mode requires. His voice is well suited to period prose, sustaining the formal register of the eighteenth century while making the psychological descent accessible to contemporary listeners. At nearly sixteen hours, this is an ambitious production of a foundational text.