 Lathom's first novel, "The Castle of Ollada" (1795) was published in two volumes, anonymously, by William Lane's Minerva Press.This work, like most of Lathom's later Gothic novels, owed much to the earlier works of such writers as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe.Although Lathom would occasionally employ bloody and horrific scenes reminiscent of M. G. Lewis, he typically followed Radcliffe's method of the "explained supernatural."