lodging for Verezzi at her castle or mansion estate near Venice. Her tireless efforts to seduce him are unsuccessful. Zastrozzi concocts a plan to torture and to torment Verezzi. He spreads a false rumour that Julia has died, exclaiming to Matilda: "Would Julia of Strobazzo's heart was reeking on my dagger!" Verezzi is convinced that Julia is dead. Distraught and emotionally shattered, he then relents and offers to marry Matilda. The truth is revealed that Julia is still alive. Verezzi is so distressed at his betrayal that he kills himself. Matilda kills Julia in retaliation. Zastrozzi and Matilda are arrested for murder. Matilda repents. Zastrozzi, however, remains defiant before an inquisition. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Zastrozzi confesses that he sought revenge against Verezzi because Verezzi's father had deserted his mother, Olivia, who died young, destitute, and in poverty. Zastrozzi blamed his father for the death of his mother, who died before she was thirty. Zastrozzi sought revenge against not only his own father, whom he murdered, but also against "his progeny for ever", his son Verezzi. Verezzi and Zastrozzi had the same father. By murdering his own father, Zastrozzi only killed his corporeal body. By manipulating Verezzi into committing suicide, however, Zastrozzi confessed that his objective was to achieve the eternal damnation of Verezzi's soul based on the proscription of the Christian religion against suicide. Zastrozzi, an outspoken atheist, goes to his death on the rack rejecting and renouncing religion and morality "with a wild convulsive laugh of exulting revenge". Reception The Gentleman's Magazine, regarded as the first literary magazine, published a favourable review of Zastrozzi in 1810: "A short, but well-told tale of horror, and, if we do not mistake, not from an ordinary pen. The story is so artfully conducted that the reader cannot easily anticipate the denouement." The Critical Review, a conservative journal with a "reactionary aesthetic agenda", on the other hand, called the main character Zastrozzi "one of the most savage and improbable demons that ever issued from a diseased brain." The reviewer dismissed the novella: "We know not when we have felt so much indignation as in the perusal of this execrable production. The author of it cannot be too severely reprobated. Not all his 'scintillated eyes,' his 'battling emotions,' his 'frigorific torpidity of despair'... ought to save him from infamy, and his volume from the flames." Zastrozzi was republished in