Saturday, March 10, 2018

Best Vampire Story Anthology Edited by Andrew Barger



With Teeth
by

As one might expect from the stories in this annotated, best vampire story anthology, teeth were used prominently in the nascent development of the vampirism mythos. And due to the human-monster theme, vampire stories developed more quickly and became more robust from both story and character development than other genres during the period in question, such as werewolf and ghost stories; so much so that they triumphed over most novels in this respect. Yet many claim that short stories are a lesser art form than the novel.

Does time bolster art and transform it into something more robust? Certainly as the aging of a Bordeaux brings out complexities of character unknown in newer wines, so too does the novel offer a bouquet of characters that are impossible to foster in the limited pages of a short story. Characters like certain wines take time to develop, and in this aspect deference must be given to the novel in whatever modern form it may take.

Where critics of short fiction often err, however, is assuming that more pages equate to greater literary art. It’s been claimed Earnest Hemmingway said that the phrase “Baby carriage for sale – slightly used” is the best thing he ever wrote.

The literary world is marred with dead trees and terrible, fat novels. Does length equal creativity and originality? Do pages equal greatness? Does size matter in fiction? Edgar Allan Poe, the same author who formed the foundation of the modern short story, claimed just the opposite. He preferred a complete tale that could be consumed in one sitting without interruption of the reader’s concentration.
And it was the same Edgar Allan Poe who likely never penned a vampire story given the research I conducted in Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems and Coffee with Poe: A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe’s Life. If a reader has to stretch their imagination to determine if a character is a vampire, then it is likely not a vampire.

Teeth play a telling role (as does the presence of blood) in many vampire tales. Because of this a number of anthologist have placed Poe’s “Ligeia” in their collections in the hopes that if the tale is put in a substantial number of vampire anthologies it will be transmogrified into a vampire story. This is certainly a misapplication in a story where the supposed vampire never comes in contact with another vampire. When Ligeia dies and is subsequently brought back to life through Rowena’s body, the unnamed protagonist touches her and she moves away, again displaying no lust for blood. Before her death, Rowena is given a cup of reddish liquid that could easily be wine or a potion concocted by the protagonist. There is no evidence that anyone’s blood was spilt. The only other hint of vampirism comes when Rowena’s lips part on her deathbed to display a line of “pearly teeth.”

Yes, it would be nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story. Poe’s only reference to vampires were in his poems. “Tamerlane” references a vampire-bat and “To Helen” calls out vampire-winged panels. Articles about the vampire motif in “The Fall of the House of Usher” have been disorganized and unconvincing. Essays about a volitional vampire in “Morella” have . . . well . . . sucked. The ponderous dissertations that seek to attribute the protagonist’s lust for teeth to a vampire fixation in “Berenice” have felt chompy. Vampires do not lust for teeth, rather blood. A Poe story listed in the Table of Contents for an anthology boosts sales. Nevertheless, in the case of vampire anthologies, Poe’s inclusion is misdirected.

Unlike the pure horror story genre in The Best Horror Short Stories 1800-1849, where Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote five of the dozen tales selected and the ghost story genre where Poe, Hawthorne and Irving collectively penned forty percent of tales in The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849, American writers (apart from one) are sadly lacking from authorship of the vampire stories for this period as they are for the werewolf genre. The top purveyors in these genres all hail from Europe apart from a few limited exceptions.
    
This makes sense given the rise of vampire legends throughout Europe, especially countries touching the Carpathian and Harz Mountains. In the April 1819 issue of the New Monthly Magazine “The Vampyre; A Tale” was published as the first vampire short story originating in the English language. The ruminations of a plot for the story were constructed by Lord Byron; yet it was fleshed out and ultimately written by John Polidori, his physician, on a literary dare. Lord Byron, in turn, got the idea from tradition and folktales. The state of the vampire legend before this story was best laid out in an article published in The Monthly Review of May 1819:

“The superstition, on which the tale is founded, universally prevailed less than a century ago, throughout Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland; and the legends to which it gave rise were not only believed, but were made the subject of learned disputations by the divines and physicians of the times. In Dr. Henry More’s Philosophical Works, and in Calmet’s Dissertation on Apparitions, may be found many interesting particulars relating to this fancy; and in the latter is an ample account of its origin and progress. It was imagined that men, who had been dead for some time, rose out of their graves and sucked the blood of their neighbours, principally the young and beautiful: that these objects of their attack became pale and livid, and frequently died; while the vampyres themselves, on their graves being opened, were found as fresh as if they were alive, and their veins full of good and florid blood, which also issued from the nose, mouth, and ears, and even through the very pores of the skin. The only mode of arresting the pranks of these tormentors was by driving a stake through the heart of the vampyre; a practice frequently adopted, and during the performance of which, we are told, he uttered a horrid groan. The body was then burned, and the ashes thrown into the grave.”

In John Polidori’s foreword to “The Vampyre” we learn that much of the vampire legend bubbled up through poetry and European legend as did many of the tales found in The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849. Yet not all of them. In 1679 “The Blood-Drinking Corpse” was published from a posthumous collection by Pu Songling (1640-1715) titled Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. He was an educator whose hobby, apparently, was to write down popular Chinese folktales. When he died he had collected nearly 500 of them. One of the first English translations was in 1913 and it can be presumed that none of the authors in this collection had access to it.

In response to “The Vampyre,” came the quick publication of “The Black Vampyre, a Legend of St. Domingo” by American, Robert Sands. And from there the vampire mythos fluttered off in the English language, darting from one short story to the next until in 1847 the novel Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood was serialized in a London Penny Dreadful. Fifty years later the world received one of the best horror books ever written--Dracula by Bram Stoker.

From folktales to poetry to short stories to novels, the vampire mythos has developed into the robust, character-driven genre we have today—and it has done so with teeth. In my anthology are what I consider the best vampire short stories published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the English language. I hope you enjoy them.

#BestVampireStories #ClassicVampireStories #VampireShortStories



Sunday, October 1, 2017

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write a Scary Vampire Story?

Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was the undisputed king of the early scary short story. He was ten when John Polidori published the first vampire story ("The Vampyre") in the English language that was followed a few months later by "The Black Vampyre," which was published anonymously by Robert Sands, valedictorian of Columbia University. 

Both caused quite a stir in the literary community and among readers at large due to their depraved horror. Many people thought Lord Byron wrote Polidori's tale. Lord Byron had to make a statement in the papers that he was not the author.

I published both of these vintage vampire stories, with detailed background information, in The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849 and are a must read for vampire aficionados. 

But what about Edgar Allan Poe? Surely Poe heard of these stories and likely read one or both when he got older. Did he respond in kind with his own vampire tale? Sorry to disappoint, but from my research Poe did not pen a vampire story. If a reader has to stretch their imagination to determine if a character is a vampire, then it is likely not a vampire. After all, a vampire is what a vampire does.

Teeth play a telling role (as does the presence of blood) in many vampire tales. Because of this a number of anthologist have placed Poe’s “Ligeia” in their collections with hopes that if the tale is included in a substantial number of vampire anthologies it will be transmogrified into a vampire story. **Spoiler Alert** When Ligeia dies and is subsequently brought back to life through Rowena’s body, the unnamed protagonist touches her and she moves away, again displaying no lust for blood. Before her death, Rowena is given a cup of reddish liquid that could easily be wine or a potion concocted by the protagonist. There is no evidence that anyone’s blood was spilt. The only other hint of vampirism comes when Rowena’s lips part on her deathbed to display a line of “pearly teeth.” If she was a vampire we would learn of long teeth or sharp teeth, but that is not the case.

Poe’s only slight references to vampires were in his poems. “Tamerlane” references a vampire-bat and “To Helen” calls out vampire-winged panels. Articles about the vampire motif in “The Fall of the House of Usher” have been disorganized and unconvincing. There is no hint that Roderick Usher was a vampire. Essays about a volitional vampire in “Morella” have . . . well . . . sucked. The ponderous dissertations that seek to attribute the protagonist’s lust for teeth to a vampire fixation in “Berenice” have felt chompy. A tooth fixation is not a blood fixation.


Yes, it would be nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story. A Poe story listed in the Table of Contents for an anthology boosts sales. Nevertheless, in the case of vampire anthologies, Poe’s inclusion is misdirected. Read these important vampires tales in BlooDeath: The Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1849.



#EdgarAllanPoeVampire #PoeVampireStory

Saturday, June 24, 2017

New English Translation of "The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains" by Alexander Dumas



In 1848 Alexander Dumas published "The Vampire of Carpathian Mountains" (also called "The Pale Lady") in his French short story collection One Thousand and One Ghosts. It is a fantastic book that contains some of the best supernatural tales Dumas ever penned. If you have at least a reading knowledge of the French language, it is well worth the effort of flagging it down on Gutenberg.org or some other site.

Of course if your French needs a bit of a refresher from high school, it becomes a more difficult task. This is especially true of Dumas's scariest vampireT short story : "The Vampire of Carpathian Mountains". When BlooDeath: The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849 was compiled, I included a 1848 translation of the Dumas vampire story from the London New Monthly Magazine. It was the rag, after all, that printed John Polidori's "The Vampyre" in 1819, which is also contained in my collection and is considered the first vampire short story to originate in the English language. So I figured the New Monthly Magazine knew a thing or two about vampire stories and would give the English translation the attention it rightly deserved.

Only after I published the classic vampire anthology did I realize I was wrong. It was brought to my attention that the original French version by Dumas included a poem that was nowhere to be found in English translation by theNew Monthly Magazine. Not only that, but the ending seemed rushed. I turned paler than a person under the throes of vampirism. I had done what is a no-no for one of my collections--I had published an abridged version of a classic short story and fallen victim the horrible magazine practice of trying to save space on the printed page.

With the aid of a translator in Montreal and a little help from online translators, I went to work. A month later I had in front of me an English translation of The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains in a form that is much closer to what Dumas originally intended. I immediately updated the ebook versions of the collection and they are live now with the non-abridged story. I hope you enjoy it and forgive my faux pas.

#VampireCarpathianMountains #DumasVampireStory

Friday, November 28, 2014

Scary Story About the Burial of People in Poland to Prevent Vampires



(NEWSER) – To make sure certain people didn't rise from the grave to feast on the living, villagers in 17th- and 18th-century Poland buried them with sickles across their throats or rocks in their jaws, and researchers think they now know why.
According to a study published in PLoS ONE, the suspected vampires were not immigrants to the area but locals who probably perished in the cholera epidemics that swept the region at the time. Ancient lore says being the first to perish in an epidemic is one of the things that can turn a person into a vampire, study co-author Lesley Gregoricka tells LiveScience.
"People were up close and personal with death at this point, but didn't have a good way to explain what was happening," she says.
"People of the post-medieval period did not understand how disease was spread, and rather than a scientific explanation for these epidemics, cholera and the deaths that resulted from it were explained by the supernatural—in this case, vampires," says Gregoricka, a bioarchaeologist at the University of South Alabama, in a press release.
Dying a violent death or being an outsider also put one at risk of becoming a vampire, according to lore, but the bodies bore no signs of violence and testing revealed they were from the area. The sickles were in place to decapitate the body if it tried to rise, and rocks or bricks were placed to prevent them from feeding, the study says — though strangely enough, the "vampires" weren't segregated in the cemetery but were buried among other villagers.

Read the Best Vampire Short Stories for this time period.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

"Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination" at the British Libary


The British Library is doing what hundreds of other libraries around the world should be doing this time of year. It is hosting "Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination" that focus on the literary Gothic.

The exhibit contains rare manuscripts of fragments of the literary Goth over the past 250 years. It is running now until January 20, 2015 and sure to feature some of the scariest vampires stories ever penned in the English language.

If you are near London, you have to pay it a visit!

Saturday, April 12, 2014

First Vampire Story Set in France - Pepopukin in Corsica

Arthur Young (1741-1820)

What was the first vampire short story with a setting in France? In the English language it appears to be "Pepopukin in Corsica," published in 1826. It was in a British rag called The Stanley Tales. The author was only attributed to A.Y. and in The Best Vampire Stories anthology I edited, I give reasons why I think the author was Arthur Young who was an English writer that travelled extensively in France. He died in 1820, so it had to be published posthumously.

"Pepopukin in Corsica," was published for the first time in 175 years in BlooDeath: The Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1849. It tells of scary vampires having claws and crushing bones. There is a nice review of the vampire tale over at the Taliesiin Vampire Blog.


Friday, March 14, 2014

Commentary on The Black Vampyre short story



There is a fine commentary on "The Black Vampyre" short story over at the Taliesin scary vampire blog: http://taliesinttlg.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/interesting-shorts-black-vampyre-legend.html that I included in The Best Vampire Stories anthology.

I liked it so much I left a comment. Check it out.