Trollheart

Title: Vampire
Format: Short story
Author: Vladimir Dal
Nationality: Russian
Written: 1848
Published: 1848
Impact: ?
Synopsis: No idea. Once again, searches turn up nothing. I believe it was part of a book he wrote on Russian folk and fairy tales, so perhaps it’s related to one of them, but I can’t say for sure. Just missed out on being the first Russian vampire tale though, pipped by Tolstoy by five years.



Title: The Pale Lady
Format: Novella
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Nationality: French
Written: 1849
Published: 1849
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Set against the background of a war between Poland and Russia, its lead character is Hedwig, a Polish girl who is sent to - wait for it - the Carpathians when her family’s castle falls to the Russians. Attacked by brigands on the way, most of her retinue is wiped out and the brigand leader, one of two brothers, takes her to his castle. Now, it turns out that while the brother, Kotsaki, led the attack it was the other one, Gregoriska who “interrupted it” - I don’t know whether he attacked his brother or not, but Hedwig falls in love with him, though Kotsaki also falls for her and declares she will die if she loves another. As they prepare to elope from the castle, Kotsaki gets word and attacks Gregoriska, who kills him.

But sure death never stops these guys, and right enough Kotsaki is back, in vampire form. Perhaps at odds with other vampire stories, he doesn’t come to suck Hedwig’s blood at midnight, but at the strange time of eight forty-five in the evening. Held by his spell, the girl doesn’t know what’s happening as she’s drained and left looking pale and sick. Someone call Van Helsing! Oh, right. He hasn’t been invented yet. Oh well. Guess it’s up to Gregoriska to save her, and once he realises dear old bro is gone fangside, he gets Hedwig “a twig of box consecrated by the priest and still wet with holy water” which will protect her from Kotsaki.

Time for some brotherly confrontation. Gregoriska uses a sword worn by a Crusader, and so deemed holy and with certain powers, to force his sibling to admit that he had thrown himself on his brother’s sword, so he had not been murdered but had in fact committed suicide. What difference that makes I don’t know, but in a rather funny and at the same time unnecessarily cruel touch Gregoriska makes Kotsaki march several miles back to his grave, where he pins him with the sword, killing him forever. The effort drains his soul though and he collapses beside the corpse of his brother.

A few things crop up here which make it likely Stoker read, or knew of this story. The first, and most glaring one is of course the setting: to my knowledge, and from the research I’ve done, his was the first vampire story set in the Carpathians, though now I see this predated it. Also the use of a sword like a later stake, the sprinkling of holy water and the use of holy relics, as well as the vampire entering a lady’s bedchamber, the sucking of her blood and the resultant paleness of the skin of the victim. Given how famous Dumas was for novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, it seems unlikely Stoker would not have heard of this story. I’m sure it came up in his extensive research.

Title: The Vampire and the Devil’s Son
Format: Novel
Author: Pierre Alexis de Ponson du Terrail
Nationality: French
Written: 1852
Published: 1852
Impact: ?
Synopsis: A baron returning from war is captured by the Black Huntsman, whom legend says is the son of Satan himself. He is held prisoner and seduced by a vampire woman, who looks like his dead wife. The novel features the most matter-of-fact attitude I’ve come across from a vampire so far: "I believe," the dead woman said, "that there is no need to explain to you by means of a lie how it comes about that, ten years after my death, I have such supple flesh, such rounded arms, and a neck so pink and white. You can see that I am a vampire..." Right you are. Glad we got that sorted then. Could have been most embarrassing.

Title: The Mysterious Stranger
Format: Short story
Author: Unknown
Nationality: Unknown
Written: 1860
Published: 1860
Impact: ?
Synopsis: No chance. Unfortunately Mark Twain also wrote a story with the same name, and when I search that’s all I get. The fact that this is anonymously written doesn’t help. I have no idea what it’s about at all. Moving on.

Title: Le Chevalier Ténèbre (The Dark Knight or Knightshade)
Format: Novel
Author: Paul Féval
Nationality: French
Written: 1860
Published: 1860
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Can’t find out too much about this, though it does seem the first ever - perhaps only - appearance of the ouvire, which is supposed to be the contemporary to the vampire, with the one eating flesh and the other drinking blood. The ouvire is, for some reason, very short while the vampire is very tall. Other than that, I got nothin’.

Title: La Vampire
Format: Novel
Author: Paul Féval
Nationality: French
Written: 1865
Published: 1865
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Yes, he was at it again, and a third time (as you’ll see) in 1874. Seemed to like writing novels about vampires, did our Monsieur Féval. He also liked doing thing differently. In this novel, he uses a female vampire, again (seems they were more popular than I had at first thought) but has her not suck blood from her victims but (ugh) rip the scalps from their heads and attach them to her own. It seems for every year of the person’s life the vampire, Addhema (who is referred to in the book as a ghoul, just to make things even more confusing) works for the vampire king Szandor, collecting treasures for him from all over the world. For this service, it seems, she is rewarded with an extended life, and eternal beauty while each life lasts. Okay then, more confusion in this sentence: “the spell only lasted a few days: as many days as the years of life that remained to the victim”. So is that the number of days they lasted after she took them? Cause if not, well surely then taking a young victim would mean she would be expected to live thirty, forty years? But who’s to say that person was not going to get sick, or be hit by a runaway cart or something, or be mugged and killed? Seems a little arbitrary. Anyway…

To quote Lewis Carroll, stranger and stranger. Addhema seemed to have some weird compulsion to tell every one of her lovers what she was before she could get down to the deed; I mean, it’s hardly exciting foreplay is it? Oh by the way darling, before you take off your hose and get on top of me, I’m a ghoul (or a vampire, take your pick, but not someone you want to bring home to mama) and I have to rip off the scalps of my victims in order to go on living and be the beautiful girl you now see lying beside you. No, just thought I should mention it. What do you mean, you have an urgent appointment elsewhere? Was it something I said?

Title: La femme immortelle (you don’t really need that translated, do you?)
Format: Novel I think
Author: Pierre Alexis de Ponson du Terrail
Nationality: French
Written: 1869
Published: 1869
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Would appear to be the first vampire novel wherein the vampirism is not real, is shown to be a trick (and not the Dark Trick, as popularised by Rice) but one in which some of the characters continue to believe. Elements that would find their way into, among others, Dracula include the taking of blood by fangs, with the wound resembling a pin prick and the vampire, or immortal woman of the title, trying to convince her lover that one of her safety pins scratched him. Might be the first instance of the idea of making a vampire by the creature cutting itself and feeding its victim its own blood.

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The Batlord

Lol I gotta finish that.

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Marie Monday

Hell yes all aboard the lesbian trash train

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Trollheart

Title: La Ville Vampire (oh yeah, here we go: Vampire City!)
Format: Novel
Author: Paul Féval
Nationality: French
Written: 1874
Published: 1874
Impact: ?
Synopsis: I would have to say, reading the summary, this was one fun guy. His vampires are just, well, out there. He seemed to be more about having fun with them than trying to seriously adapt the legends, and Bram Stoker would probably have shaken his head and walked away, unable to take anything from this writer. A few details: a Buffy-like slayer goes to Selene, the Vampire City of the title, to rescue her friend. With her is an Irishman called Merry Bones, servant to her friend Grey Jack, and, um, a transgender vampire called Polly who, uh, carries their coffin around on their shoulder. Well, they don’t have much of a choice in that, since it’s chained to them. Kinky.

And that’s just the start. Féval’s vampires are (can I go on? I must) clockwork robots who have to be wound up by an evil priest (who seems too busy to appear in the novel - hey, evil doesn’t just spread itself you know!) in order to heal themselves. They have a tendency to explode if they come in contact with the heart of another of their kind. So much for two hearts are better than one! Oh wait: a cremated heart. Well that’s all right then. They also don’t use their teeth to puncture the flesh, but have sharp little thorns on their tongues for this, and they can duplicate themselves. Sounds amazing fun, especially for the time. A kind of prototype hybrid of vampire fiction and steampunk. Now I want to read it!

Well, you can see there are many firsts here - some of them onlies I guess, as who else is likely to have clockwork vampires? But here we have the first female vampire hunter, ever, so far as I can see, the first usage of a priest as an agency of evil, the first mention in a vampire story of a doppelganger, and of course the first time it’s intimated that vampires have their own city. I imagine their tourist board is not exactly busy.


Title: Le Capitaine Vampire (again, surely no translation required?)
Format: Novel
Author: Marie Nizet
Nationality: Belgian
Written: 1874
Published: 1874
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Another set against the backdrop of war, this time the Turko-Russian one of 1877 - 1878 in which the lead character, Boris Liakoutine, is a colonel in the Romanian army and has earned himself the nickname of Captain Vampire due to his incredible cheating of death on several occasions, and the tendency of women who get involved with him to meet suspicious ends. Other characters in the book include Iaon, a young army officer and his sweetheart Mariora. It’s said the true function of the vampire in this book is to serve as a metaphor for the horror of war, and given that Nizet was only nineteen when she wrote it, that’s a pretty mature way to look at something which could have been handled in a much more general way, given, at the time of writing, the growing number of vampire texts.

To write an anti-war novel (even if its intention is somewhat disguised within the then-burgeoning horror genre) at a time when nationalism and territorialism were rampant was indeed a courageous move, especially by a young woman, and might account for the book’s failure, being largely ignored despite its quality of writing. Nizet’s vampire does cast a shadow, unlike Stoker’s, and his pupils are vertically slit like those of a cat, which adds a nice feral kind of idea to the description. With these eyes he can hypnotise his victims - something Stoker would pick up on, though surely it’s in the basic research he would have done on the vampiric myths - and appears to have the power to be in two places at once, something I haven’t seen any other vampire able to achieve. He also (as would be necessary, even crucial, in an army officer) can walk in the daylight without any ill effects.

There's a suggestion in a review of a much later continuation of these tales that Captain Vampire may be the first “energy vampire”, that is, subsisting not on blood but on the life force of living beings. I don’t know if that’s addressed in this novel, but the idea seems to be that it is.


Title: After Ninety Years
Format: Novella
Author: Milovan Glišić
Nationality: Serbian
Written: 1880
Published: 1880
Impact:
Synopsis: Certainly the first Serbian vampire story, it seems to be another which moved away from what Stoker would set down as the standard nearly two decades later, sticking more faithfully to the legends, especially, as might be expected, those of Serbia. A young man who has been thwarted in his attempts to marry the mayor’s daughter leaves his village and travels to another, where it seems the miller keeps getting murdered. I wonder if the vampire grins "It's Miller time!"? Sorry. Every time someone takes the post he is found dead with a red ring around his neck. The youth, Strahinja (no, not the ninja!) decides to take the post and see what happens. As you do.

He crouches in the loft of the mill with two pistols, waiting, and the vampire shows up. Unlike Dracula, this guy is not pale, not at all; in fact, his face is described as being “red as blood”. He’s big and tall, and carries with him his death shroud, which Serbian folklore tells he must always have with him, otherwise he will lose his power. Bit of a giveaway I would have thought. The vampire, who calls himself Sava Savanović, seems to cut a rather pathetic, even sympathetic figure as he bemoans the fact that he’s hungry. He says he’s been a vampire for ninety years and never yet gone hungry. Where is the miller? “Right here!” Strahinja might have said, and lets him have it with both barrels. When the smoke from the guns clears, the vampire is gone.

The villagers are amazed and overjoyed the next morning when they see Strahinja is still alive, and listening to his tale of vampires, they take him to see an old woman, who says she remembers Sava Savanović, that he was an evil man when he lived. She directs them to his grave, but there’s a problem. Though she’s told them where it is, they need to go through some complicated process to actually locate it; this involves using a black, ungelded horse, holy water and hawthorn stakes. The lore about these last is interesting, and actually makes a certain kind of sense.

Hawthorn was apparently what the Roman soldiers fashioned Jesus’s crown of thorns from, so it’s seen to have holy properties and evil creatures would be very much averse to it. But more - apparently - scientifically, hawthorn releases a chemical called trimethylene, which is attractive to butterflies, who cluster on the branches. What else releases this chemical? You got it: corpses. So butterflies will also be attracted to dead bodies, making them a kind of flying corpse locator. Nice.

So they locate the grave, thanks to the horse, who paws at the ground to show them where the coffin is buried, find Sava kicking back, bloated and full of blood, and they pour holy water on him. Well, not quite. Perhaps because they’re scared, or maybe some of them have taken a little “something” to fortify them for the grisly work, they spill it, and a butterfly escapes from the vampire’s mouth. This is perhaps meant to symbolise the vampire’s essence leaving his body, and though they stake him later on some children die in the village, evidence that he’s not quite as dead as they think, and may have another ninety years in him, or more. Stahinja is rewarded with the hand of the mayor’s daughter, the refusal by her father of which had precipitated his exit from the village, and all live happily ever after. Maybe.

From the extract above, it doesn’t seem like this is your typical-of-the-time Gothic novel. In fact, it’s really not Gothic at all, with no dark castles or dread spectres or family curses or windswept heaths, and reads more as a fairy tale than anything else, with a lot of humour in it and a certain, as I say, sense of pathetic sympathy for the hungry vampire. It draws heavily on Slavic beliefs, and I assume would have been quite popular in its native country at the time, relatable to most people there. It’s notable that there’s no actual depiction of the attack of the vampire, nobody gets killed except as related in the past and then only vaguely (all those millers) and then at the end the few children, but there are no graphic descriptions, or even the method used by the vampire to drain his victims, though clearly it is him, as he laments going without supper.

I think it seems to rely mostly on the power of suggestion and a fill-in-the-blanks kind of thing, which gives the impression that the author wasn’t trying to invent the genre, but writing a story within an already existing one, in which some of the conventions had been established, but from which he borrowed only sparingly, creating his own idea of what the vampire would be.


Title: The Fate of Madame Cabanel
Format: Novel
Author: Eliza Lynn Linton
Nationality: English
Written: 1880
Published: 1880
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Although written by an Englishwoman, the story is set in France, where a well-to-do gentleman brings home his new English wife, and things begin to get weird. The maid notices the flowers brought for the new wife and thinks they’re odd - belladonna and scarlet poppies among them - to say nothing of the violently hateful reaction of M. Cabanel when he sees them, ordering them out of his sight, which does not at all upset the new Mme. Cabanel, who just smiles enigmatically.

She’s not a hit with the villagers, who call her 'La beauté du diable,' though obviously not to her face. Perhaps unfairly, she’s immediately believed to be a vampire, as Martin the gravedigger grumps ; 'with those red lips of hers, her rose cheeks and her plump shoulders, she looks like a vampire and as if she lived on blood.' Always ready to give someone the benefit of the doubt, huh? I thought vampires were meant to look thin, wasted, pale and cadaverous? Unfortunately for Mme. Cabanel, this gravedigger is well respected in the village, and known to be privy to the secrets of the spirits, so his opinion counts for a lot.

From what I can see so far, this woman is no vampire, but merely a stranger in a country which is to be her new home, and the locals don’t like her. There’s very much a nasty undercurrent of xenophobia running through this, as if Linton hates and despises the French, and so presents her Madame Cabanel as a heroic martyr, especially tormented by her new husband’s housekeeper, Adèle, who may be more than just a housekeeper to him, or wish to be. By all accounts, Mme. Cabanel is sweet-tempered and good, friendly and tolerant, despite all Adèle’s attempts to provoke her.

As sickness begins to spread through the village, it’s this spiteful jealous little housekeeper who begins to disseminate the rumour - without any evidence of course - that it’s the fault of the master’s new wife. She goes for support of her wild accusations to Martin, the old gravedigger, and he, consulting tarot cards (always a good scientific basis for evidence) tells her that he suspected Mme. Cabanel from the beginning (as we saw) and that now the cards reveal her to be a vampire.

Well of course they do. Tarot cards are notoriously easy to misinterpret, either in ignorance of what they actually mean, or purposely, to skew a reading. I’m sure we all know the death card is supposed to signify great change, not death itself, and as for the happy squirrel… Anyway, good old Martin bands up with Adèle and together they hatch a plot, which is helped by the lady’s habit of walking in the graveyard, though as explained by the author, there is no horror attached to this. It’s simply the nicest place in a pretty ugly village, and Mme. Cabanel likes to walk among the graves and look at all the flowers on them. Innocent enough, but like the tarot cards, such activity can be twisted and warped into that of a ghoul. Which of course it is.

And things get worse. Her husband now falls ill, as well as Adèle’s son, and the doctor suspects the wife is poisoning both (without a shred of evidence, naturally) while the villagers have their own ideas, neither of which have any, or require any proof for them to move upon the silent accusation. Warned by both the doctor and Adèle (for different reasons), and it now being clearly revealed that the housekeeper had been M. Cabanel’s lover before he took his new wife, the slow-thinking man is convinced and turns against his bride. Though she tries to help the village children she is rebuffed, and people look on her with hatred and anger. Eventually the husband softens towards her and they reconcile (on his side at least; she has no idea, or takes no notice of the fact that he was cold toward her) but then he has to go away and she is left at the mercy of the slow-witted and suspicious villagers.

Probably not hard to see where this is going, but let’s continue and see. The boy gets worse and, against orders, the maid allows Mme. Cabanel to hold him, and he seems to calm down. But then he bites his lip and she tries to kiss it better. Bad idea. Now she has blood - his blood on her lips. Enter Adèle, as if she’s been watching and waiting for this moment, and roars in disgust and triumph at the woman, pointing at her bloodstained mouth. She just happens to have all the others, including rabble-rouser Martin with her, and they, for their part, have evidence in front of their very eyes. As the child has fallen asleep, they believe him to be dead, and they drag Mme. Cabanel to the Pit, where it is said the White Ladies roam and kill. Unable to believe such superstitious nonsense (and in all likelihood, not too well able to understand everything that’s said, since she’s English and I doubt anyone is slowing down to let her determine the words) she mocks them and will not defend herself.

By the time they get to the pit, it seems their innocent prisoner has died, and this spooks many of the party, who are confused, as a vampire should not be able to die. Just then there are the sound of hoofbeats and everyone scatters apart from Martin and Adèle. It turns out to be the husband, who has returned with the doctor and four gendarmes. Furious, broken-hearted, M. Cabanel cradles his dead wife, shouting at Adèle that she will pay for this. Adèle turns for support to the doctor but he tells her she is crazy, and M. Cabanel orders her arrest for murder, telling her he never loved her, or if he did, after what she has done, all that is left now for her is hate. In despair she jumps into the pit and kills herself, Martin and the others are arrested, though he still maintains that Mme. Cabanel was, and is, a vampire. Nobody is listening to him, now it’s too late.

So this isn’t a vampire story. If anything, it’s a disdainful look at parochial superstition, a woman taking a high and mighty look down at the stupid creatures below her who believe such things. It’s also as I said highly xenophobic, as Linton constantly refers to the Englishwoman as innocent and pure, while the French are, to a man and woman, dirty, ignorant, stupid and craven cowards. It’s anti-French in the worst possible way, and surely did nothing to help relations between the two countries. It also deals with themes of jealousy, as this is the prime motivating factor for the hateful Adèle to accuse her replacement, as well as themes of abandonment, as she feels cast to one side for the younger, prettier English girl. Superstition is a common thread running through this story, with also an admonition not to place too much credence in the beliefs of old men who think they know everything.

In any other, let’s say civilised country or part of it, a man who swears he sees demons and imps would be laughed at; here, such experiences go in Martin’s favour, and his opinion is highly prized and respected. The one man who should not be deciding who or what is a vampire is left to make that determination, spurred on by a woman who has at best questionable reasons for getting rid of her. There is at least a certain sense of justice at the end, when reason triumphs over superstition, but by then the damage has been done. Mme. Cabanel probably suffocated as she was being carried to the pit, though we’re not told how she died. The refusal of Martin to accept he was wrong is annoying, but totally in keeping with his age and his perceived wisdom on such matters. Some people never learn.

It’s a fiercely nasty story, told with disdain by the author and carrying with it the stink of high moral authority, as if the people of this village - and by extension, all of France - are nothing more than savages who need to be civilised. It’s condescending, inflammatory and really has no place in vampire literature.

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Trollheart

Title: Manor
Format: Short story
Author: Karl Heinrich Ulrich
Nationality: German
Written: 1884
Published: 1884
Impact: ?
Synopsis: We’ve had the first female vampire, the first black vampire and even the first transgender vampire. Now, a hundred years before Anne Rice (almost) comes the very first gay vampire. Despite my expectations, the title does not refer to an old, crumbling house around which vampires shuffle and stalk, but is the name of the protagonist, a sailor who saves another one, Har, from drowning, and the two become friends, and in time, more than that. Manor leaves on a whaling voyage, and to Har’s dismay is drowned when the ship founders. But later Manor comes to Har and sucks his blood, as they develop a curious kind of homosexual relationship.

The village isn’t having that. Not the gay liaison; they don’t mind that. But they draw the line at vampires, and set out to destroy Manor. He’s not so easy to kill though, being strong and vital even if he is pale and ghostly-like. He’s restricted to nocturnal roaming, and stays in his coffin during the day, when the “community”, as they’re described in the summary I’m reading, try to stake him but the attempt fails because the stake needs to have a head, like that of a nail, to work, in a departure from traditional vampire lore. Also slightly different, Manor sucks the blood from Har via his nipple, rather than from his neck, and it seems too that Har is aware of, and willing to deal with the vampire, as long as he loves him.

The matter-of-fact way the villagers deal with the news that there is a vampire in their midst is quite amusing:

“To the people of Wagoe she [Har’s mother] said, "The insecurity of your graves has exposed one of us to danger. A man here is leaving his grave every evening, coming over to us and sucking his fill of blood from this poor youth."
"We'll try to secure it properly," the people of Wagoe said.

Well that’s all right then. Also hilarious is their reaction upon opening Manor’s grave (with, I should also mention, a stake “as tall as a man” - what were they going to do with it, pole vault over him??)

"One of the people of Wagoe said, "Look, he hasn't moved since the day we buried him."
"That's because he gets into the same spot each time he returns," the wise woman replied.”
Ah, the wise woman! Two things, me lord, must ye know about the wise woman, First, she is…. A woman! And second…

Har’s frantic entreaty to his vampire lover is also side-splitting.
"Manor, Manor," he cried, his voice quivering. "They're going to drive a stake into your heart. Manor, wake up. Open your eyes. It's me, your Har."

What, did he think that if the vampire woke up this would be looked on as a good thing? “Oh look, he’s awake. Throw away that stake, we don’t need it now.”

In the end they nail that sucker, and poor Har dies, but whether from blood loss or a broken heart is unclear. He asks to be buried in the same grave as Manor, and for the stake to be taken out of his lover’s body. His mother says she’ll do that, but I wonder? Still, with Har now dead and presumably with Manor forever, what reason would the vampire have to trouble the living? Or maybe they both end up haunting the village. It doesn’t say.
I guess for its time the story couldn’t be too graphic - it’s not graphic at all - and there’s actually no mention of sex in it, so perhaps it’s more implied than shown. Still, even the implication would have got Ulrichs into trouble, so it’s a brave effort to create the world’s first homosexual vampire. It is unintentionally funny though.


Title: The True Story of the Vampire
Format: Short story
Author: Count Stanislaus Eric Stenboch
Nationality: Swedish
Written: 1894
Published: 1894
Impact: ?
Synopsis: And now the first Scandivanian account, written by a Swedish author, of a vampire, which appeared apparently in Stoker’s later collection, Dracula’s Guest, published in and seems to be the second homosexual vampire story. Count Vardalek visits the castle of Baron Woopsy sorry I mean Wrondki (those nobles must stick together) and develops a passion for the younger Gabriel, who wastes and sickens under Vardelek’s attentions till he dies.

The opening lines of the story seem to mock Stoker, though his seminal novel would not be published for another three years:

“VAMPIRE STORIES ARE GENERALLY located in Styria; mine is also. Styria is by no means the romantic kind of place described by those who have certainly never been there. It is a flat, uninteresting country, only celebrated by its turkeys, its capons, and the stupidity of its inhabitants. Vampires generally arrive by night, in carriages drawn by two black horses.”

Although the story is narrated by a female, it also seems that the Count (the real one, the author) is referring to the public’s perception of his widely-known eccentricities when he says (or she says) “It is to tell how I came to spend most of my useless wealth on an asylum for stray animals that I am writing this.” Take that, polite society!

Count Stanislaus’s vampire seems to be a reluctant one, one who cannot die though he wishes to, and who seems to regret taking life, as he says about Gabriel (playing the piano): “My darling, I fain would spare thee; but thy life is my life, and I must live, I who would rather die. Will God not have any mercy on me? Oh! oh! life; oh, the torture of life!” Or perhaps, more accurately, oh the torture of having to read this! Yeah, it’s a very basic story, and if you know vampires there are zero surprises, twists or deviations from the legend. The only difference being that, as I say above, this vampire seems tortured by what he has to do.

The author himself was strange. As already mentioned, he kept a menagerie of animals, and also always travelled with a dog and a monkey, as well as a life-sized doll, which he seemed to think was alive, and his son. No, seriously. When he hadn’t got it with him, he would enquire about its health, and the rumour was that he had paid a priest a fortune to “educate” it. He was also said to sleep in a coffin, though how true this is I don’t know.

But as far as writing vampire stories goes, I’ve read his, and, no pun intended, it sucks.


Title: Lilith
Format: Novel
Author: George MacDonald
Nationality: Scottish
Written: 1895
Published: 1895
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Tres weird. In the synopsis I can find no mention at all of a vampire; this seems to be a fantasy/horror novel with plenty of disparate elements, many of which are taken from Christian belief (hence the title I guess) but I can’t see a simple undead creature anywhere. Not sure why it’s included. Look, it’s a novel: I’m not going to go reading the whole thing in the hope there may be a vampire or vampires lurking somewhere, but it does concern me that MacDonald uses as the medium of his protagonists’ passage from one world to the next a mirror, when a rather more famous novel had already used this only twenty years before.


Title: The Blood of the Vampire
Format: Novel
Author: Florence Marryat
Nationality: English
Written: 1897
Published: 1897
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Published the same year, this novel was inevitably going to suffer from comparison to Dracula, which would ride head and shoulders over all vampire novels and stories written to that point, and many after it. Its protagonist is Harriet, a female Jamaican vampire, who comes to Belgium and meets two English women, one of whom, Margaret, is dubious about allowing her to hold her baby, and finds herself drained. Baroness Gobelli invites her to England; meanwhile she spends more time with Margaret’s child, who gets progressively more ill. Eventually the baby dies, and the doctor summoned to investigate the cause can’t figure it out. It does transpire though that he knew Harriet’s father.

When Harriet gets to England she has the same effect on the Baroness’s young son, who also sickens and dies. Baroness Gobrelli accuses her of having “black blood” and “vampire blood”, and Harriet, having met and falling in love with a man, is frightened and returns to Belgium to seek the advice of the doctor. He tells her that her mother was a slave and her father performed medical experiments on his own slaves (whether or not that includes her mother I don’t know) until they revolted and killed him. He warns Harriet never to marry, but of course she is in love and goes ahead anyway. When she wakes up on her wedding morning to find her new husband dead, she is overcome with grief and takes poison.

Is this the first vampire novel or story without a self-aware vampire, I wonder? I’d have to check back, but whether deliberate by their own hand or made by another, I think every other vampire so far as at least known and recognised what they are. Harriet does not, and is horrified by the possibility she could be responsible for these deaths. She has to face that when she is presented with the still-warm corpse of her husband of a few hours on the morning after their wedding, and is so grief-stricken that she kills herself. But is she even a vampire? Well, we assume so, and it’s postulated that it’s a hereditary thing, unlike many or most of the vampires we’ve read about up to now. It’s also allied, rather uncomfortably, to her black heritage, which surely says something about racism.

The delight of the little Harriet whipping the slaves on the plantation “as a treat” is grossly disturbing, but of course meant to be so. I’m reminded of the episode “Chain of Command” in Star Trek: The Next Generation, when a Cardassian child asks his father - who is torturing Captain Picard - about the human, and the officer smiles that humans do not love their children as Cardassians do. The parallel is obvious: reduce the object of your violence to beneath the status of human and it’s no longer wrong to punish them. You’d beat a dog (well, I wouldn’t but some people would) and have no problem with it, but beating a man or a woman? Might be a little more reluctance there. The fact that slaves have been reduced to the status of mere property means there’s no need to worry about whipping them; in fact, it’s the right thing to do.

Although Harriet is of mixed-race, it’s odd how she refers to the slaves as “niggers”, obviously not including herself in their race, believing herself above them, even though she has clearly black blood in her veins and her own mother was, as she finds out later, a slave, but being brought up on the plantation she was no doubt told she was nothing like them. Quite how she can be a vampire and not know it I don’t understand: does she go into a trance or something, lose her human identity like a werewolf, only regaining it when her hunger is sated? I haven’t read the novel, but I wonder if it says or if Marryat leaves it open to conjecture?

I feel the comparisons made with Dracula and Carmilla are unfair. These two novels bookend the latter half of the nineteenth century, written within twenty years of each other and towering like two colossi over early - and indeed, later - vampire literature, so they would of course be used as a yardstick for anything that came after (or in the case of Dracula, at the same time), but I don’t see, from the admittedly short synopsis, that many similarities between the three books. Carmilla is a female vampire, yes, but seems well aware of what she is, almost glorying in it, while Dracula is, well, male, and seems to bear no real resemblance to the vampire here, nor are the events taking place in a similar location. I wonder if those two books had not been written, and assuming Marryat doesn’t use them as inspiration (which I don’t know) would her novel have been better received?

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Trollheart

Yes, let the trumpets ring out in glorious fanfare! We've finally reached that moment!

Roll out the red carpet!

Let the tickertape parade begin!


Next up...


Watch this space (and your back)!

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Trollheart

We interrupt our timeline to bring you the sad news of the passing of a legend in vampire fiction. Anne Rice, author of The Vampire Chronicles, has died aged 80 in a hospital in California from complications following a stroke. We now present our own little tribute to this remarkable woman.

Queen of the Undead: A Tribute to Anne Rice (1941 - 2021)

While it would not be fair or accurate to say Anne Rice created the genre unofficially known as vampire literature or vampire horror, she certainly was one of the first, if not the first to drag the well-worn tropes into the twentieth century, reviving the genre at a time when really all there was were novels about Bram Stoker’s most famous creation. Her first vampire novel - in fact, her first novel - was published in 1976, only a year after Stephen King’s horror masterwork Salem’s Lot, but whereas King focussed on the evil, monstrous, terrifying aspect of his vampires and made them not in the least sympathetic, Rice took a different approach with her vampires. Indeed, in the very first book, Interview with the Vampire, in which we are introduced to her star Lestat de Lioncourt, through the recollections of his protege, Louis de Pont du Lac, there’s an immediate effort by Rice to allow us to see the world through the vampire’s eyes, to realise he’s not only the monster Stoker, LeFanu and others have painted the undead as, and most importantly, he hates what he has become.

Up to now, what vampire writing there had been had mostly concentrated on presenting the vampire as a monster, something to be destroyed, and something that wanted to destroy us. Anne Rice, while never allowing us to lose sight of the fact that vampires are evil creatures, helps us understand there is more to them that lustful blood-drinking and hunting. She shows us a species, if you will, who adore art and music, love company, travel and literature, and who enjoy the finer things life has to offer, while yet at the heart of it loathing what they have become. Even Lestat, the “brat prince” of vampire literature, who revels in his debauchery and power, becomes, over the course of five novels, bored with immortality and finally reaches a revelation about his existence which even he cannot ignore.

Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien on October 4 1941, to Irish Catholic parents in New Orleans, almost two months to the day before America was attacked by Japan and drawn into World War II. Her father in fact served in the navy, and did write one novel, while her mother - who had given her the unusual name of Howard because “she was a bit of a madwoman” according to Anne herself - was a badly-sinking alcoholic and would die before Anne was fifteen. Another source claims it was her father who gave Anne her name, but in 1947 she legally changed it to Anne O’Brien. After her mother passed in 1956, her father wasted no time replacing her, and also farming out his children to the local private school for girls, St. Joseph Academy, which she and her sister hated, and which may have influenced some of the claustrophobia of later novels such as Queen of the Damned and Lestat’s incarceration at the end of Memnoch the Devil.

A year after remarrying, her father moved the family to Texas, where Anne would meet her future husband, Stan Rice. After studying at the University of San Francisco and working at an insurance firm, Anne married Stan in 1961 and they moved back to San Francisco the next year. Though they lived in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury district and it was “the summer of love”, Anne did not get involved, her strict Catholic upbringing leaving her writing while outside “everyone was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square”. Her refusal to get involved in the drug scene paid off (though she was emulating her mother, as both she and her husband were now alcoholics) and she graduated from San Francisco State with an M.A. in creative writing in 1970. Her first child, Michele, born in 1966 was diagnosed with leukemia and only lived six years, dying in 1972, surely the inspiration for Claudia, the frustrated vampire child in her first novel.

However, the uncompromising attitude of the Catholic Church, and its inherent hypocrisy so angered and affected Anne that she officially left the Church around this time, declaring herself an atheist. She would maintain this stance well into her fifties, and her, if you like, release from the bonds of Christianity was to characterise her novels and allow her to people them with creatures who mocked God, even hated God, also loved God but many of whom refused even to believe in one. It was only in Memnoch the Devil, the final book in the original Lestat story, that she would approach the subject head-on by doing something no other writer to my knowledge has ever done, and have her character speak face-to-face with God himself. And the Devil.

When her second child, Christopher, was born in 1978, she and Stan made the decision to give up the booze, Anne afraid that her son would suffer the same life she had done, and determined this would not be the case. When she first wrote Interview with the Vampire she says herself that she did not do much research, but based the idea on the horror movie Dracula’s Daughter, still managing so far as I can see to be the first author to present vampires as sympathetic beings the reader could relate to. After many rejections the novel was finally picked up and Anne was on her way. Two more vampire novels followed (in between some risque adult writing under pseudonyms) as The Vampire Chronicles began to grow and take shape. Eventually the series would run to ten novels, moving away from its central character to tell the stories of others, such as Marius, Pandora and Armand. She also diversified into other areas of horror, writing a trilogy about witches, a novel about a mummy and, later, religious novels based on the life of Christ.

She wasn’t an overnight sensation though. Critical reaction to Interview with the Vampire was mixed, and mostly negative, which caused her to question her choices and change tack for a few years. It was the sequel, The Vampire Lestat (which, it has to be said, is a far superior book and my favourite of the original trilogy) that changed the critics’ minds, and by the time the conclusion of what was at that time a trilogy, The Queen of the Damned was published, it made the New York Times Best Sellers list, going right to the top and staying on the list for a third of 1988. That year she and her family moved back to New Orleans, where they would remain and where most of her novels would be set. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church, though still disagreeing with many of its core stances, such as homosexuality and abortion rights, and this year too she had her first brush with death.

In truth, Anne Rice almost died twice, the first time being as above when she fell into a diabetic coma (unaware she even had diabetes) and then again in 2004 when she had a gastric bypass and almost died from an intestinal blockage. Whether this had any impact on her writing or not, she now chose to devote her remaining creative energies to praising God in her writing, though she didn’t by any means dismiss or disavow her supernatural works, those that had made her the famous figure she had become.

“I had experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940s and 1950s ... we attended daily Mass and Communion in an enormous and magnificently decorated church.... Stained-glass windows, the Latin Mass, the detailed answers to complex questions on good and evil—these things were imprinted on my soul forever.... I left this church at age 18.... I wanted to know what was happening, why so many seemingly good people didn't believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behavior and value of their lives.... I broke with the church.... I wrote many novels that without my being aware that they reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God.

"In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul. He wasn't going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake.”

Without meaning to speak ill of the dead, especially someone I truly respected, I have to say this comes across as the next best thing to apologism for the Church and all the horror and evil it has presided over, even orchestrated down the centuries. It’s a blase, incredibly naive and in some ways insulting viewpoint to say “oh it’s all right cos God knows everything.” Bullshit.

But as I say, I don’t want to speak ill. I just wanted to say I completely and categorically disagree with and do not support her view expressed above.

After the death of her husband in 2002 Rice left New Orleans in 2005, with remarkable foresight or just pure dumb luck managing to miss Hurricane Katrina by months or weeks, and followed Christopher to California. In 2010 she had again had it with Christianity, as she explained the difference she saw between being a Christian and following Christ:

"Today I quit being a Christian.... I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."[83][84] Shortly thereafter, she clarified her statement: "My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”

In contrast to her 1998 statement, it’s hard not to applaud and agree with this. Far too many so-called Christians don’t know what it is or what it is meant to be to be one, and have no intention of following any of the teachings of Jesus other than those that suit their own agenda. Makes me thank God I’m an atheist.

For me personally, Rice was a window into the world of horror, vampire horror and somewhat historical fiction, as I had not been a horror fan and had not seen or read Salem’s Lot, and I think I may have read Dracula beforehand, but I’m not sure. If I did, it was the only vampire novel I had read. Once I began Interview with the Vampire I was hungry for more (sorry) but at the time I read it, though it was far from its original publication date (1986 I think) it was the only one available by her, so when I saw a sequel (technically a prequel I guess) bearing the name of the anti-hero of that first novel, I didn’t need any further prompting to grab it excitedly from the shelf at Eason Book Shops and shell out my hard-earned on it. Incidentally, for those interested, I found Interview with the Vampire almost by accident, after having listened to the Sting song “Moon Over Bourbon Street” and reading that he had based it on the novel, which I then went out to find, so thanks, Sting: you did at least one good turn for me in your life.

The film adaptations of her work had a mixed reception. Even the box-office draw of Tom Cruise in the title role couldn’t win the movie of Interview with the Vampire an Academy Award, though it did very well in the box office and was a hit; it’s poorly remembered though and was quickly drowned out by movies such as the seventh in the Star Trek franchise, Generations and the truly awful The Santa Clause as Christmas approached. It did win two BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and Kirsten Dunst in her first role did well out of it, as did Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas, but few people will cite it now who are not fans. Personally I thought Cruise did a very good job, considering that Rice had slated him as “about as much my Lestat as Edward G. Robinson!” It might, though, be telling that the film’s lack of enduring appeal may have prevented Cruise from reprising the role in The Queen of the Damned, which fared much worse.

After much opposition by Anne the plan was to merge the two novels in one, which was crazy given how much ground there is to cover in one of them, never mind two. The central theme of the twins was dropped, again a ridiculous decision, and basically the movie was a mess. It barely made back its budget, making a paltry ten million as compared to the first one which almost quadrupled its initial outlay. Queen of the Damned ironically lived up to its name, receiving almost universally negative reviews, triggering a poor 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and resulting in Rice advising her fans to “forget it” as it “mutilated” her work. Even the death of its other star, Aaliyah as Akasha, the eponymous queen, a few months prior to its release, could not save the movie’s reputation. After this bomb, Rice decided television was the way to go (I could have told her that) and she and Christopher were working on a series based on The Vampire Chronicles only months before her death.

I will be the first to admit I have not read all Rice’s material. Some of her novels did not resonate with me at all. I hated Violin, was not interested in Pandora and did not read any of her non-vampire novels at all. In fact, I really only read the first five of the Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil, which for me placed a perfect seal on the story of Lestat, including Rice’s own touching little farewell to her creation, and his personal bowing out of the story. I have not read Prince Lestat yet, though I do have Blackwood Farm: I have yet to open it though.

If Rice had not written anything beyond those five novels, I think I would have been satisfied, and perhaps so too would she. Between them, they cover all but the entire story of Lestat, her central and most important figure, from his birth through his “birth to darkness” and on to his eventual redemption, even his return to mortality. It’s hard to think of a more perfect coming of full circle in literature, and to my mind she might have been better to have left it there, but that’s just my personal opinion.

What is not in doubt is that, whether she directly influenced them or not (or whether they will admit it) Rice surely set the groundwork and prepared the road for future writers of vampire fiction, such as Charlaine Harris, L.J. Smith and Stephanie Meyer, as well as already-established authors like Brian Lumley and Tanith Lee. Of course, her treatment of the vampire as an intensely sexual (and usually bisexual or homosexual) being has led to something of a glut of what can only really be described as “vampire porn”, but I suppose that will happen with any genre, especially one so rooted in sensuality and sexuality. Whatever the result or the side-effects though, it can be hardly disputed that the woman named Howard as a girl set the blueprint for the modern vampire novel, and for the fanged monsters and debonair villains to make their way from large screen to small, kicking off a vampire craze not really equalled in popularity until the sudden obsession of the public with zombies. Anne Rice taught us that vampires aren’t just monsters and, hey, they need love too.

Rest in Peace, Anne. Your work is done.

Or to paraphrase the end of Memnoch, the Devil:
Believe me, in my words, in what I have said and in what has been written down. I am here, still, the hero of my own dreams, and let me please keep my place in yours.
I am Anne Rice.
Let me pass now from fiction into legend, and from legend into history.
Adieu, mon amour.

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Trollheart

Yeah it's the quintessential English travelogue, isn't it: rife with xenophobia, racism and colonialism, but all of that makes it even more poignant when Harker is left trapped in Castle Dracula, pining for home and his lover. It also shows how people - including Stoker - of the day saw "foreign" lands such as Austria and Romania and anywhere ending in -ania: real "darkest Africa" kind of stuff.

It's a wonderful novel, there's no doubt, even if hardly original (as you can see from the other entries) and it just caught the balance, I think, between serious Gothic horror, romance and adventure stories, and a kind of English triumphalism that really struck a chord with the public.

The powers of Dracula are so enhanced here that I bet some people reading it for the first time were checking outside their windows at night if they heard a scratching sound, or waking up in a cold sweat. It seemed the Count could be anywhere, any time.

As it goes, this is merely the beginning of the article. I have a lot more to say about the man before we even get to discussing the novel in depth so, like they say, stay tuned!

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The Batlord

Her parents named her Howard?!

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Trollheart

They did. There's varying stories as to who was responsible, both stories give pretty damn stupid justification for saddling a girl with such a name:

About her unusual given name, Rice said:

Well, my birth name is Howard Allen because apparently my mother thought it was a good idea to name me Howard. My father's name was Howard, she wanted to name me after Howard, and she thought it was a very interesting thing to do. She was a bit of a Bohemian, a bit of mad woman, a bit of a genius, and a great deal of a great teacher. And she had the idea that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world.[16]

However, according to the authorized biography Prism of the Night, by Katherine Ramsland, Rice's father was the source of his daughter's birth name: "Thinking back to the days when his own name had been associated with girls, and perhaps in an effort to give it away, Howard named the little girl Howard Allen Frances O'Brien."[17] Rice became "Anne" on her first day of school, when a nun asked her what her name was. She told the nun "Anne," which she considered a pretty name. Her mother, who was with her, let it go without correcting her, knowing how self-conscious her daughter was of her real name. From that day on, everyone she knew addressed her as "Anne",[18][19] and her name was legally changed in 1947

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