The first time I read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, I was a graduate student. The second time, I was on my way to the real Castle of Otranto itself, as part of an artists’ colony for the month of June. The Castello Aragonese, as it is locally known, is the only castle in the ancient, walled city of Otranto, a truly quirky town in a largely rural part of Italy known as Salento, or Puglia. This land, with its ancient shrines and churches and rocky sea caves and mysterious Stonehenge-like dolmen, is an old, old place—a mystical place, where things start and grow, where anything can happen, and where the sun colors everything it touches with a kind of earthy truth. As Otranto was where I began to write what would become my first completed novel, I now regard The Castle of Otranto as not just the first Gothic novel, but as the cousin of my own Gothic first novel. In the preceding pages, my Otranto has been recast for a modern setting, inspired by not just Walpole’s Otranto, but by a love of all things Gothic and Southern Gothic, a recent brush with the world of film production, and, of course, four blissful summers at the Castello Aragonese itself. So, in that ancient southeastern light, I leave you with my modern spaghetti Gothic, “Sirocco.”