Classic Vampire Stories
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Table of Contents
Introduction
By Leslie Shepard
Carmilla
By Sheridan Le Fanu
The Horla
By Guy De Maupassant
The Sad Story of a Vampire
By Stanislaus Eric
Good Lady Ducayne
By M.E. Braddon
The Tomb of Sarah
By F.G. Loring
For the Blood is the Life
By F. Marion Crawford
The Room in the Tower
By E.F. Benson
The Transfer
By Algernon Blackwood
Dracula's Guest
By Bram Stoker
Vampire
By Jan Neruda
Mrs. Amworth
By E.F. Benson
Four Wooden Stakes
By Victor Roman
Authenticated Vampire Story
By Franz Hartmann
INTRODUCTION
E
ver since Bram Stoker's spine-chilling novel Dracula revived an ancient superstition in the nineteenthcentury, the Vampire theme has proliferated in literature, plays and horror films.Today, vampires are the subject of scholarly research, and there has even been an accredited course onVampirism at California State University.With the discovery of a real prototype Dracula in the person of Vlad Tepes the Impaler in fifteenth-centuryTransylvania, popular interest in vampires has increased sensationally. Bram Stoker's Dracula has beenreissued by several different publishers, and there is an ever-growing demand for all those other longout-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 theyare--those chilling, thrilling, spine-tingling masterpieces that shocked the public long before Bela Lugosi andhorror movies.Perhaps one reason why these stories have such an impact is that the key features of vampire fiction arebased on vampire fact, carefully researched from old traditions. From earliest times vampires had beenreported in many cultures throughout the world--Babylonia, China, India and Europe. Folk tales and legendsperpetuated this gruesome history into comparatively modern times, when talented writers took over fromtraditional tellers of tales, and wove their own chilling fantasies around basic facts. Most modern writers onvampires owe an enormous debt to the painstaking researches of the Rev. Montague Summers, preeminentauthority on vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and black magic, who classified ancient traditions andwritings on these subjects.Vampire fiction got off to a creaking start with John Polidori's story The Vampyre, first published in theNew Monthly Magazine, England, April 1819. This Gothic novelette owed its success as much to being thework of Lord Byron as to its sensational theme. In fact, Byron had sketched out the theme at a weird houseparty in a village on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, when Mary Shelley's masterpieceFrankenstein was also born. Polidori's vampire was soon followed by popular penny dreadful shockers likeVarney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood by Thomas Preskett Prest, who also penned the immortal SweeneyTodd, 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 LeFanu, whose Carmilla takes pride of place in the present collection. It was described by the Rev. MontagueSummers as "the best of the English vampire stories."Carmilla has woven into its story a curiously modern theme of Lesbian love, but the action is steeped intraditional vampire lore--the old castle in Styria, the vampire's grave with a well-preserved body, and thefinal dreadful act with an iron stake, the decapitation, and the burning of the body to ashes. Le Fanu was anacknowledged master of ghostly stories, and this mysterious recluse of Merrion Square, Dublin, innineteenth-century Ireland was even known as the "Invisible Prince," a haunted man obsessed by strange
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