view the style in terms of cycles. Prior to the development of films, the genre has its connections to broadly-based fiction of the 18th century. Elements of the thriller are traced to the earliest gothic novel with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) which led to Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Rubin noted that the extended vunerability of the enthralled protagonists and victims in the thriller anticipated the thriller genre, a statement echoed by Robert D. Hume's 1969 essay which asserts that the Gothic novel involved a reader in a new ay, with increased emphasis on suspense, sensation and emotion opposed to moral and intellectual focuses. The gothics being considered thrillers is problematic as they are set in antiquated decaying worlds and fail the tradition of being considered "modern". The second literay form that predated thrillers was the Victorian sensation novel, starting with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859-1860) which stripped the gothic genre of its mysticism and brought to a contemporary time closer to every day life. These sensation novels often were published in serialized form, sometimes concluding their installments with cliffhangers called "climax and curtain". The third of the proto-types to the thriller was early detective and mystery fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which is widely considered the first detective story. The detective story drew upon the previously mentioned forms, and is shown through stories such as the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. The roots of the thriller also generally associated with the rise of the urban-industrial society in the 19th century which created new and expanded mass audience, along with new forms of entertainment. This included stage play melodrams such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in which an escaped slave escapes over an ice-choked river and the rural-set melodrama Blue Jeans (1890) which features a heroine who unties the hero just before he is cut by and advancing buzz saw. Other forms of entertainment arrived in the 19th century at fairgrounds and amusements parks with thrill-oriented rides and attractions such as Ferris wheels, Shoot the Chutes, which Rubin described as offering a "departure from humdrum reality that is merely a heightened version of that same humdrum reality.". Silent era At these same fair grounds, is where the earliest venues for film exhibition