Obviously, The Castle in setting at least comes out of the romantic tradition of the gothic with its excessively expressive settings and strange, often cavnerous, castles and morbidly evocative country houses. And certainly there is more than a hint of Bram Stoker's Dracula in Kafka's work. But while the gothic traditions can be read as psychological metaphors, their surface realism partakes of a different literary world. Kafka's Castle is largely rendered through K's internal responses to it and therefore lacks many of the particulars associated with the gothic tradition.

As with The Trial (1925) and The Metamorphosis (1915), it is the strangeness of the prose which creates much of the atmosphere, an atmosphere that avoids the excesses of the melodramatic often associated with the mouldering dwellings and haunted inhabitants of the classic horror or supernatural tale. The characters, especially K., experience a disassociation often present in such fiction...