Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories [Kindle Edition]

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"Sims, editor with this brilliant collection, gathers stories from the undead written during what he loosely terms the Victorian era.... the bloodsuckers presented here are predators who might be turned away only by Christian symbols, garlic, and little else. Do not expect sparkling Twilight vampires or even the good-guy types that sometimes appeared within the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise. An excellent addition to popular fiction and literature collections." --Library Journal (starred review)

"Dracula's Guest invokes the dangerous shadows of Victorian culture, those dark places where passion, terror, pathos, and sorrow mingle and merge. Gathering together canonical works as well as less familiar knock-out masterpieces, Michael Sims has produced an anthology designed to help keep us all up at night."--Maria Tatar, professor and chair of the program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, author of The Annotated Classic fairy Tales and Enchanted Hunters: The Ability of Stories in Childhood

"In this fine new anthology, Michael Sims brings to bear his extensive familiarity with Victorian tales along with their tellers on the vampire genre. Despite the title, Sims's nets have caught fascinating material that pre-dates Dracula and the Victorians. Some will likely be familiar (excerpts from works through the Abbé Calmet, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Varney the Vampire, for example), but other authors and stories will be not used to many, revealing surprise depth and breadth for the thrall of the undead. With a thoughtful introduction on the volume also as each story, this book belongs inside crypt of each student from the creatures from the night!"--Leslie S. Klinger, editor of The Brand New Annotated Dracula and The Brand New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

"Everyone loves a great vampire story, nonetheless it takes a true aficionado having an insatiable thirst for knowledge to ferret the roots of these monsters' enduring appeal. There is no better guide towards the natural history and mythology of the Undead than Michael Sims."--Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics from the Buffyverse and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats
Before Twilight and True Blood, even before Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula.
Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the Victorian era-from England, America, France, Germany, Transylvania, as well as Japan-into a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with all the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" to Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne." Sims also features a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds your collection with Stoker's own "Dracula's Guest"-a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.
Vampires captivated the Victorians, as Sims reveals in his insightful introduction: In 1867, Karl Marx described capitalism as "dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor"; whilst in 1888 a London newspaper invoked vampires in attempting to explain Jack the Ripper's predations. At an occasion when vampires are actually re-created in a very modern context, Dracula's Guest will remind readers young, old, and in between of why the undead won't rid yourself of our imagination.


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