Book: Classic Vampire Stories
Author: Leslie Shepard
Pages: 152
Format: PDF
Language: English
ISBN10: 080651664X
Transylvania, popular interest in vampires has increased sensationally. Bram Stoker's Dracula has been
reissued by several different publishers, and there is an ever-growing demand for all those other long
out-of-print vampire stories that thrilled and horrified our parents.
Now for the first time, we have assembled the all-time greats of vampire fiction in one volume. Here they
are--those chilling, thrilling, spine-tingling masterpieces that shocked the public long before Bela Lugosi and
horror movies.
Perhaps one reason why these stories have such an impact is that the key features of vampire fiction are
based on vampire fact, carefully researched from old traditions. From earliest times vampires had been
reported in many cultures throughout the world--Babylonia, China, India and Europe. Folk tales and legends
perpetuated this gruesome history into comparatively modern times, when talented writers took over from
traditional tellers of tales, and wove their own chilling fantasies around basic facts. Most modern writers on
vampires owe an enormous debt to the painstaking researches of the Rev. Montague Summers, preeminent
authority on vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and black magic, who classified ancient traditions and
writings on these subjects.
Vampire fiction got off to a creaking start with John Polidori's story The Vampyre, first published in the
New Monthly Magazine, England, April 1819. This Gothic novelette owed its success as much to being the
work of Lord Byron as to its sensational theme. In fact, Byron had sketched out the theme at a weird house
party in a village on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, when Mary Shelley's masterpiece
Frankenstein was also born. Polidori's vampire was soon followed by popular penny dreadful shockers like
Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood by Thomas Preskett Prest, who also penned the immortal Sweeney
Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, that great standby of nineteenth century melodrama.
Such primitives of vampire literature merely set the stage for the finer work of writers like Sheridan Le
Fanu, whose Carmilla takes pride of place in the present collection. It was described by the Rev. Montague
Summers as "the best of the English vampire stories."
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