Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (The Connoisseur's Collections)

Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (The Connoisseur's Collections) by Michael Sims. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780802719713.

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 Stokers legendary 1897 novel, Dracula. Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the Victorian era-from England, America, France, Germany, Transylvania, and even Japan-into a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Edgar Allan Poes "The Oval Portrait" and Sheridan Le Fanus "Carmilla" to Guy de Maupassants "The Horla" and Mary Elizabeth Braddons "Good Lady Ducayne." Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stokers own "Draculas 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"; while in 1888 a London newspaper invoked vampires in trying to explain Jack the Rippers predations. At a time when vampires have been re-created in a modern context, Draculas Guest will remind readers young, old, and in between of why the undead wont let go of our imagination.