Book description
>Before
Twilight
and True Blood
, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers
indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's
legendary 1897 novel, Dracula
.
Acclaimed author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest
vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that
highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true
accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from
Aleksei Tolstoy's tale of a vampire family to Fitz James O'Brien's
invisible monster to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rich and sinister widow,
Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour
of Transylvanian superstitions, and finishes the collection with
Stoker's own Dracula's Guest
- a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.
Vampires captivated Victorian society, and these wonderful stories
demonstrate how Romantic and Victorian writers refined the raw ore of
peasant superstition into a whole vampire mythology of aristocratic
decadence and innocence betrayed.> 'This creepy conoisseur's
collection of Victorian vampire stories is PACKED with pointy-toothed
blood-suckers and gruesome ghastliness ... Think Christopher Lee in his
coffin, red eyes snapping open, dust off your wooden stake and garlic
necklace, and blame the 18th century Eastern Europeans whose peasant
superstitions spawned the whole gory vampire genre' Daily Mail 'Long
before vampires were sparkly and romantic, they were actually scary.
This collection brings together some of the Victorian era's most
chilling bloodsucker fiction' Entertainment Weekly 'Vampire stories
didn't begin with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, Anne Rice's bayou
bloodsuckers or even Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. What one finds, in
reading Dracula's Guest, is that these creatures emerged from 18th
century accounts of Eastern European peasant superstitions, then got a
boost from the Romantic movement... Almost from the beginning, the
vampire story wasn't just a creepy encounter with the Other Side; it was
thinly veiled erotica. The undead were hot long before Hollywood and the
fan obsession surrounding Eclipse, the latest installment in the
Twilight series' Los Angeles Times >Before Twilight
and True Blood
, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers
indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's
legendary 1897 novel, Dracula
.
Acclaimed author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest
vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that
highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true
accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from
Aleksei Tolstoy's tale of a vampire family to Fitz James O'Brien's
invisible monster to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rich and sinister widow,
Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour
of Transylvanian superstitions, and finishes the collection with
Stoker's own Dracula's Guest
- a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.
Vampires captivated Victorian society, and these wonderful stories
demonstrate how Romantic and Victorian writers refined the raw ore of
peasant superstition into a whole vampire mythology of aristocratic
decadence and innocence betrayed.>
