Scan barcode
thegothiclibrary's review
5.0
Vampires: First Blood, Volume I: The Vampire Lords traces the evolution of the male vampire in literature through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the introduction, James Grant Goldin lays out some common threads that will appear in the tales throughout the collection—particularly the evolution of the association of vampirism with aristocracy, which he considers key to the creature’s continued popularity. What follows are nine tales in chronological order, each with an introduction and an afterward explaining some context and the story’s significance within the wider vampire genre. The first piece in the collection is not a work of fiction, but rather a newspaper article from 1732 reporting the allegedly true account of a Serbian peasant named Arnold Paul who returned from the dead to torment his neighbors. From there, we see the vampire appear in two poems: “Der Vampir” by Heinrich August Ossenfelder and “The Vampyre” by John Stagg. Next come the two stories that emerged out of Villa Diodati, Byron’s unfinished fragment and Polidori’s elaboration on Byron’s tale. Then there are two Russian tales by Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (a second cousin of Leo Tolstoy), an excerpt of the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, and finally, The Pale Lady, a lesser-known work by the famed French novelist Alexandre Dumas.
See my full review: https://www.thegothiclibrary.com/vampires-first-blood-volume-i-review/
See my full review: https://www.thegothiclibrary.com/vampires-first-blood-volume-i-review/
More...