Girogio Vasari, a 16th century contemporary, referred to the French architecture of the high to late middle ages as "gothic", used as a pejorative to denote the "barbarous German style." The next link in the chain would be Gothic literature, the literary style that combines horror, death, and sometimes romance. The name for the literary style is presumed to come from author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its second edition) "A Gothic Story". Walpole was fascinated with medieval history and had a fake gothic castle built, indicating the origin of the subtitle. Form this point the term gothic began to denote the dark and macabre, reflecting the atmosphere wrought by the literature. This brings us to 1967 when music critic John Stickney described a meeting he had with Jim Morrison. He described the dimly lit wine-cellar where they met as "the perfect room to honor the Gothic rock of the Doors". The term was picked up by other critics and used to denote the atmosphere elicited by post-punk bands. Our modern day goths, as a subculture, spun off from the gothic rock scene which was in itself a branch of the post-punk scene.
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