Another way in which people experienced the Orient was through literature, exemplified in Bram Stoker's adoption of a travel diary as a narrative device in Dracula. Stories were often set in an Oriental locale (also the case with Dracula, set in former Ottoman territory), exotic lands fraught with dangers, as in Beckford's Vathek, whose central character is a Muslim ultimately damned for his numerous sins, including homosexuality and mass murder of a group of naked young boys. Gothic horror, a subgenre of Romantic literature that will be examined in the following chapter, was aligned with the growing popularity of Orientalism.

XREF: Connects Orientalism (Said's framework) to Gothic horror genre studies, an underexplored intersection worth tracing.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 422