The landscapes of Gothic horror reflect these foreboding spaces. Zofloya's victims occupy cavernous and dark homes and creepy and labyrinthine forests. Vathek's kingdom is a shop of horrors, with a giant eye that follows every move, skies full of human blood, and hellish chasms in which masses of innocent children are sacrificed. Dracula lives in Transylvania, a land that even today is associated with monsters. The desert is important because it was the original wasteland. It is the space that inspired these other environs of horror.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 491