Lord Byron cited Vathek as a source for his poem The Giaour. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron also calls Vathek "England's wealthiest son". Other Romantic poets wrote works with a Middle Eastern setting inspired by Vathek, including Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and Thomas Moore's Lalla-Rookh (1817).[8] John Keats's vision of the Underworld in Endymion (1818) is indebted to the novel.[9]
Edgar Allan Poe mentions the infernal terrace seen by Vathek in "Landor's Cottage". Stéphane Mallarmé, who translated Poe's poems into French, inspired by this reference in "Landor's Cottage," had Vathek reprinted in its original French, for which edition he also supplied a preface.[10] In his book English Prose Style, Herbert Read cited Vathek as "one of the best fantasies in the language".[11]
H. P. Lovecraft also cited Vathek as the inspiration for his unfinished novel Azathoth.[12] Vathek is also believed to have been a model for Lovecraft's completed novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.[13]
American fantasy author Clark Ashton Smith greatly admired Vathek. Smith later wrote "The Third Episode of Vathek", the completion of a fragment by Beckford that was entitled "The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah". "The Third Episode of Vathek" was published in R. H. Barlow's fanzine Leaves in 1937, and later in Smith's 1960 collection The Abominations of Yondo.[14]
Vathek has been well received by historians of the fantasy genre; Les Daniels stated Vathek was "a unique and delightful book". Daniels argued Vathek had little in common with the other "Gothic" novels; "Beckford's luxuriant imagery and sly humour create a mood totally antithetical to that suggested by the grey castles and black deeds of medieval Europe".[15] Franz Rottensteiner calls the novel "a marvellous story, the creation of an erratic but powerful imagination, which brilliantly evokes the mystery and wonder associated with the Orient"[16] and Brian Stableford has praised the work as the "classic novel Vathek—a feverish and gleefully perverse decadent/Arabian fantasy".[17]
