LIKE GOETHE'S WERTHER, Kleist's Kohlhaas, and Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Robert Maturin's gothic romance Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) exposes the demonic underside of a resurrection of the flesh and a death that brings one into life. Melmoth emphasizes the unnatural quality of a form of life that belongs to death; the novel makes the reader share in what Maturin's character Monçada calls “the horror of being among those who are neither the living nor the dead” (MM 205). In the first chapter, Old Melmoth, John Melmoth's uncle, hovers on the boundary between life and death and leads the reader into that realm of horror. He dies before the chapter is done, dies definitively and permanently, providing by means of his death the promise of an inheritance and therefore a comfortable life for his nephew. Before he dies, however, he brings up the topic of one who should have died but who lives on. In fact, Old Melmoth proposes that his death is a direct result of the living-on of that other, an ancestor depicted in an old portrait kept in a closet: