Zastrozzi: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1810 in London by George Wilkie and John Robinson anonymously, with only the initials of the author's name, as "by P.B.S.".

The first of Shelley's two early Gothic novellas, the other being St. Irvyne, outlines his atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi[1] and touches upon his earliest thoughts on irresponsible self-indulgence and violent revenge.

The epigraph on the title page of the novel is from Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, Book II, 368–371: —That their God May prove their foe, and with repenting hand Abolish his own works—This would surpass Common revenge.

Pietro Zastrozzi, an outlaw, and his two servants, Bernardo and Ugo, disguised in masks, abduct Verezzi from the inn near Munich where he lives and take him to a cavern hideout.

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".

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."

[6] In 1977, Canadian playwright George F. Walker wrote a successful play adaptation called "Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline" based on the Shelley novella.

[10] Walker's play retains all the major characters of the Shelley novella, the core plot, and the moral and ethical issues relating to revenge and retribution and atheism.

Phillip Wade noted how the allusions to John Milton's Paradise Lost are present in both novels:[13] "Shelley's earlier characterization of Zastrozzi with his 'lofty stature' and 'dignified mein and dauntless composure' clearly owed much to Milton's Satan, as did that of Wolfstein in St. Irvyne, described as having a 'towering and majestic form' and 'expressive and regular features ... pregnant with a look as if woe had beat to earth a mind whose native and unconfined energies had aspired to heaven.'

In this second romance Shelley had also pictured a character 'whose proportions, gigantic and deformed, were seemingly blackened by the inerasable traces of the thunderbolts of God.'

This kind of description, so patently imitative of Milton's characterization of Satan, is as evident in Frankenstein as it is in Shelley's juvenile romances.

Matilda heard a noise -- footsteps were distinguishable, and looking up, a flash of lightning disclosed to her view the towering form of Zastrozzi.

A peal of crashing thunder again madly rattled over the zenith, and a scintillating flash announced Zastrozzi's approach, as he stood before Matilda.

This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, "William, dear angel!

As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure ... A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me, its gigantic stature ... instantly informed me it was the wretch, the filthy demon, to whom I had given life.

'"He concluded that both books show Shelley's use of Miltonic themes: "Granted, storm scenes are not unusual in Romantic literature; one need only recall Byron's Childe Harold.

But the Miltonic image of a titanic Satan silhouetted by fires in the pitchy blackness of Hell bears the unmistakable mark of Shelley's influence.

"Stephen C. Behrendt noted that the plan for getting revenge upon God in Zastrozzi, as referenced in the epigraph, "anticipates the guerilla warfare that the Creature will wage on Victor Frankenstein": "Speaking to the assembly of fallen angels in Hell, Beelzebub is proposing a means of achieving revenge against God.

Matilda's reaction is described: "At one point she imagined that Verezzi, consenting to their union, presented her his hand: that at her touch the flesh crumbled from it, and, a shrieking spectre, he fled from her view".

The principal fictional prose writings of Shelley are Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, The Assassins, A Fragment of a Romance (1814), an unfinished novella about a morality-driven sect of zealots determined to kill the tyrants and oppressive dictators in the world, The Coliseum[17] (1817), Una Favola (A Fable), written in Italian in 1819, and The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment (1818), which presents fictional fantasy with political commentary.