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  New medical procedures being introduced around this time may have inspired ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (1896), by Mary E. Braddon. In this lacklustre yarn a latter-day Elizabeth Bathory has survived well beyond the normal lifespan by getting her private physician to inject her with blood he has drained from his employer’s young female companions, all of whom fade away and die. A far superior story by this author is ‘Herself’ (1894), which was included in Vintage Vampire Stories after years of undeserved neglect. Set in Italy, it chronicles the gradual decline in health of a bubbly young woman after she becomes morbidly enraptured by an antique mirror, which steals some of her vitality every time she gazes into its depths.

  A female vampire of royal blood, who comes to life and sucks the blood of an Englishman after her ancient resting-place is disturbed, is featured in ‘The Tomb Among the Pines’ (1894), an uncredited story which was initially published in the British periodical Household Words. One of the most exotic vampiresses from the 1890s is the evil enchantress in ‘The Crimson Weaver’ (1895), by R. Murray Gilchrist. Incredibly old yet stunningly beautiful, she lures a knight into her magical domain and kills him horribly after enslaving him with a kiss. Similarly, in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s ‘The Legend of Sir Dinar’ (1891) an Arthurian knight seeking the Holy Grail is held in thrall by a beautiful vampiress who steals his youth. There can be no doubt, however, that the deadliest female vampire from this period is Annette, the central character in Dick Donovan’s 1899 story ‘The Woman with the “Oily Eyes”.’ An irredeemably evil monster in womanly form, she attracts upright men against their will and brings about their destruction, using her mesmeric eyes to subjugate them. Another story from 1899, Vincent O’Sullivan’s ‘Will,’ is notable for its effective use of the ‘biter bit’ scenario. Similar in style to Poe’s macabre tales, it tells how a man with an irrational hatred for his wife relentlessly draws out and absorbs her life force by gazing at her intently for hours on end, until eventually she dies. The tables are turned, however, when the dead woman constantly haunts her husband, sapping his will to live.

  One of the most unconventional vampire stories from the late Victorian era is ‘A Kiss of Judas’ by ‘X. L.’ (pseudonym of Julian Osgood Field). First published in 1893, it is based on the curious legend of the Children of Judas, the substance of which is that the lineal descendants of the arch-traitor are prowling about the world intent on doing harm to anyone who offends them. Luring their victims into their clutches by any means necessary, they kill them with one bite or kiss, which is so deadly it drains the blood from their bodies, leaving a wound on the flesh like three X’s, signifying the thirty pieces of silver paid to Christ’s betrayer. Another offbeat story is Count Eric Stenbock’s ‘The True Story of a Vampire,’ which comes from his 1894 collection Studies of Death. Count Vardalek, whose activities this story chronicles, is a male version of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, but whereas she was homoerotically attracted to another woman, Vardalek has similar feelings about a young boy.

  ‘The Priest and His Cook’ and ‘The Story of Jella and the Macic’ are two folkloric tales that have recently been extracted from The Pobratim, an 1895 novel by Professor P. Jones. The former appeared for the first time in Vintage Vampire Stories, and the latter makes its debut in the present volume. Two better-known stories from the 1890s that have turned up in vampire anthologies on more than one occasion are ‘Let Loose’ (1890), by Mary Cholmondeley, and ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’ (1891), by Ambrose Bierce. Both are difficult to classify, but a case for including them in the vampire canon can be made if one views them as stories about the dead returning to wreak vengeance on the living, using methods akin to vampirism. There are, however, no such doubts about the eligibility of H. B. Marriott Watson’s ‘The Stone Chamber’ (1898) to be categorised as a vampire story. Set in rural England, it tells how guests staying at Marvyn Abbey awake in the morning feeling exhausted and have red marks on their necks, a tell-tale sign that they have been preyed upon by a vampire.

  Stories about vampires of the non-human kind were also popular during the final decade of the nineteenth century. For instance, in H. G. Wells’ ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894), a collector of exotic plants is attacked by a bloodsucking orchid growing in his hothouse; while in Fred M. White’s ‘The Purple Terror’ (1899) a group of explorers are menaced by vampire-vines in the Cuban jungle. Even more loathsome is the vampire-like monstrosity in Erckmann-Chatrian’s ‘The Crab Spider’ (1893), in which animals and people who enter a cave at a German health resort are attacked and have their bodies drained of blood by a giant arachnid. In another fascinating story, Sidney Bertram’s ‘With the Vampires’ (1899), explorers journeying up the Amazon encounter cave-dwelling vampire bats. The same geographical location is also the setting for Phil Robinson’s ‘The Last of the Vampires’ (1893), in which a German trader comes across a huge vampire-pterodactyl, to which human sacrifices are made.

  A psychic detective whose cases sometimes involved vampire-like phenomena is Flaxman Low, who appeared in a series of allegedly real ghost stories in Pearson’s Magazine between 1898 and 1899 under the byline of E. & H. Heron, a pseudonym used by the mother-and-son writing team Kate and Hesketh Prichard. In ‘The Story of Baelbrow,’ for instance, Low investigates mysterious deaths at a reputedly haunted house, and discovers that a previously ineffectual spirit-vampire has become a deadly killer by activating an Egyptian mummy in his client’s private museum. In another exploit, ‘The Story of the Moor Road,’ a malevolent elemental becomes palpable after absorbing an invalid’s vitality; and, in ‘The Story of the Grey House,’ guests staying at a secluded country house are strangled and drained of blood by a demoniacal creeper growing in the shrubbery.

  The 1890s was also a productive decade for vampire novels, but apart from a select few most are forgotten today. Towering above them all is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which, since its launch in 1897, has gone on to sell millions of copies around the world and is undoubtedly the most influential vampire novel ever written. Surviving changes in fashion and numerous indignities at the hands of clumsy editors, it has, over time, earned itself a unique place in the vampire canon, and has deservedly achieved the status of a classic of English literature. The enduring appeal of this novel is primarily due to its sensational plot and Stoker’s spellbinding narrative power, but it is also noteworthy for two other reasons. Firstly, it has systemised the rules of literary and cinematic vampirology for all time, and secondly we have in Count Dracula the definitive incarnation of the human bloodsucker.

  The only novel from the 1890s to rival Stoker’s magnum opus in popularity is H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), which was the first novel to feature alien vampires. For the benefit of those who haven’t read Wells’ classic, or are only familiar with the plot through watching adulterated film versions, the vampires are the invading Martians, who, we learn, turned to vampirism after their digestive tracts atrophied almost completely, making them solely reliant on blood for sustenance. Initially they preyed on their fellow Martians, but when supplies of the life-giving fluid became exhausted they were forced to look beyond their own planet for survival, and found just what they needed on neighbouring Earth.

  J. Maclaren Cobban’s Master of His Fate (1890), which was strongly influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, concerns the tragic fate of a scientist who has discovered a formula that enables him to renew his youth by absorbing energy from other people merely by touching them. However, as the necessity to absorb larger amounts of energy arises, he is forced to commit suicide to prevent the deaths of his ‘donors,’ who include the woman he loves. Another novel probably inspired by Stevenson’s split-personality classic is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). While not usually thought of as a vampire, Gray can quite legitimately be likened to one in view of his destructive, self-indulgent lifestyle, an essential part of which is the consumption of other people’s life-energy in order to gain eternal yout
h. Vampirism of a similar nature is practised in H. J. Chaytor’s The Light of the Eye (1897) and L. T. Meade’s The Desire of Men: An Impossibility (1899). In the former, a man’s eyes have the power to suck out people’s vitality, while Meade’s thriller revolves around weird experiments in a strange house, where the aged regain their lost youth at the expense of the young. Other novels from the 1890s with vampirism as the main or subsidiary theme are: The Soul of Countess Adrian (1891), by Mrs Campbell Praed; The Strange Story of Dr Senex (1891), by E. E. Baldwin; Sardia: A Story of Love (1891), by Cora Linn Daniels; The Fair Abigail (1894), by Paul Heyse; The Lost Stradivarius (1895), by J. Meade Falkner; Lilith (1895), by George MacDonald; The Blood of the Vampire (1897), by Florence Marryat; In Quest of Life (1898), by Thaddeus W. Williams; and The Enchanter (1899), by U. L. Silberrad.

  The only vampire novels from the first decade of the twentieth century of any significance are In the Dwellings of the Wilderness (1904), by C. Bryson Taylor; The Woman in Black (1906), by M. Y. Halidom; and The House of the Vampire (1907), by George Sylvester Viereck. In the first of these, a party of American archaeologists is attacked vampirically by the revivified mummy of an Egyptian princess; while the novel by the pseudonymous M. Y. Halidom features a glamorous seductress who has retained her beauty and youthful appearance for centuries by sucking the blood of her lovers. In contrast, the vampire in Viereck’s novel – an arrogant, self-centred writer – acts like a psychic sponge, stealing the most creative thoughts of his protégés and passing them off as his own.

  A short story from the turn of the century which has remained popular over the years is F. G. Loring’s ‘The Tomb of Sarah.’ First published in the December 1900 issue of Pall Mall Magazine, it centres on the nocturnal activities of an undead witch who has been accidentally released from the confinement of her tomb during renovations to a church. For a while her nightly forays in search of blood cause great concern among the local community, but she is eventually caught and permanently laid to rest by the time-honoured ritual of driving a stake through her heart. A much more sensational story from this period, Richard Marsh’s ‘The Mask’ (Marvels and Mysteries, 1900), is about a homicidal madwoman adept in the art of mask-making who transforms herself into a raving beauty and tries to suck the blood of the story’s hero. Female vampires are also featured in two stories in Hume Nisbet’s collection Stories Weird and Wonderful (1900). In ‘The Vampire Maid’ a weary traveller finds lodgings at an isolated cottage on the Westmorland moors, only to be preyed on during the night by the landlady’s vampire daughter; and in ‘The Old Portrait’ a woman depicted in a painting comes to life and tries to suck out the vitality of the picture’s owner with a long, lingering kiss. Offering more substantial fare, Phil Robinson’s ‘Medusa,’ a well-crafted story from Tales by Three Brothers (1902), is about a seductive femme fatale who feeds on the life force of her male admirers. A more subtle threat is posed in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘Luella Miller’ (1902), the title character of which unconsciously absorbs the vitality of her nearest and dearest, causing them to languish while she blooms. On more traditional lines is F. Marion Crawford’s vampire classic ‘For the Blood is the Life’ (1905), in which a gypsy girl returns from the dead to vampirize the man who had spurned her love. In another first-rate story, R. Murray Gilchrist’s ‘The Lover’s Ordeal’ (1905), a young woman challenges her fiancé to pass through an ordeal before she will consent to marry him. This involves spending the night at a haunted house; but, unbeknown to the couple, a beautiful vampiress is lurking in one of the rooms, waiting patiently for her next victim to come along. An inconsequential piece, by comparison, is ‘The Vampire,’ by Hugh McCrae, which was originally published under the pseudonym ‘W. W. Lamble’ when it appeared in the November 1901 edition of The Bulletin.

  One of the Edwardian era’s finest vampire stories is ‘Count Magnus,’ by M. R. James, which has been anthologised many times since its debut in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904). Among this author’s spookiest tales, it chronicles the events leading up to the gruesome death of an English scholar, who becomes a doomed man after delving too deeply into suppressed legends about a notorious seventeenth-century Swedish nobleman. A minor story, ‘The Vampire’ (1902), by Basil Tozer, has seemingly sunk into oblivion, a fate that may well have befallen Frank Norris’s ‘Grettir at Thorhall-stead’ (1903) had it not been rescued from obscurity by fantasy historian Sam Moskowitz, who reprinted it in his 1971 anthology Horrors Unknown. Not entirely original, Norris’s story is a retelling of an episode in Grettir’s Saga, in which the legendary Icelandic hero has a fateful encounter with a vampire. Coincidentally, the same episode also provided the inspiration for Sabine Baring-Gould’s ‘Glámr,’ which was included in his A Book of Ghosts (1904). Another vampire story from this collection is ‘A Dead Finger,’ in which the hapless protagonist is preyed on by the disembodied spirit of a dead man, which is gradually stealing his vitality in an attempt to create a new body for itself. On similar lines to this story are Luigi Capuana’s ‘A Vampire’ (1907), which describes how the disembodied spirit of a woman’s deceased husband attempts to suck the blood of her infant child; and Lionel Sparrow’s ‘The Vengeance of the Dead’ (1910), in which a thoroughly evil man has, since his demise, existed in a state of life-in-death by stealing vitality from the living and transferring it to his corpse. More ambitiously, the unscrupulous scientist in C. Langton Clarke’s ‘The Elixir of Life’ (1903) has isolated the vitic force and found a way to transfer it from others to himself, thereby attaining a kind of immortality. More conventional in their treatment of the vampire theme are ‘The Vampire Nemesis’ (1905), by ‘Dolly,’ and ‘The Singular Death of Morton’ (1910), by Algernon Blackwood. In the former story a suicide is reincarnated as a giant vampire bat; and, in the latter, two men holidaying in France encounter a sinister woman, who lures one of them to a cemetery and sucks all the blood from his body.

  Some of the best stories from the Edwardian era feature vampires in unusual guises. In Morley Roberts’ ‘The Blood Fetish’ (1909), for example, a severed hand lives on as an independent entity by absorbing the blood of both animal and human victims. In another morbid tale, Horacio Quiroga’s ‘The Feather Pillow’ (1907), a young woman has all the blood gradually sucked out of her by a monstrous insect secreted inside the pillow on her bed; and in F. H. Power’s ‘The Electric Vampire’ (1910) a mad scientist creates a giant, electrically-charged insect which feeds on blood. Even more bizarre is Louise J. Strong’s ‘An Unscientific Story’ (1903), in which a professor who has succeeded in breeding the ‘life-germ’ in his laboratory soon realises the folly of his experiments when his creation grows at a fantastic rate and within a short time forms itself into a humanoid creature which exhibits a craving for blood.

  The first anthology to gather together a sizeable number of stories from this golden age of vampire fiction was Richard Dalby’s Dracula’s Brood (1987), which contained twenty-three rare stories written by friends and contemporaries of Bram Stoker. Then, after years of searching through dusty old books and defunct magazines, Richard and fellow vampire enthusiast Robert Eighteen-Bisang compiled an even rarer collection of stories for their 2011 anthology Vintage Vampire Stories. Now, after more diligent searching, Richard and I have put together this stunning new collection of stories, nearly all of which have been unavailable for many years, and include several forgotten gems whose resurrection from an undeserved obscurity should finally bring them the recognition they deserve.

  BRIAN J. FROST

  THE BRIDE OF THE ISLES

  A Tale Founded on the Popular Legend of the Vampire

  Anonymous

  When this story, which is based on James Robinson Planché’s play The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles, received its first publication in 1820, the publisher, J. Charles of Dublin, took the liberty of falsely attributing it to Lord Byron, and the real author is unknown. Nevertheless, it is an excellent example of the bluebook or ‘Shilling Shocker,’ which were the t
erms usually used to describe short Gothic tales published in booklet form during the early 19th century. Retailing between sixpence and a shilling, they were about four by seven inches in size, and their closely printed pages were stitched into a cover made of flimsy blue paper. These luridly illustrated publications were especially popular with members of the lower classes, many of whom craved the thrill of reading stories revolving around shocking, mysterious and horrid incidents, but couldn’t afford to buy expensive Gothic novels, which were often published in three volumes. A copy of the rare 1820 first edition, complete with its coloured frontispiece, fetched £2000 at auction three years ago.

  ‘THOUGH the cheek be pale, and glared the eye, such is the wondrous art the hapless victim blind adores, and drops into their grasp like birds when gazed on by a basilisk.’

  THERE IS A popular superstition still extant in the southern isles of Scotland, but not with the force as it was a century since, that the souls of persons, whose actions in the mortal state were so wickedly atrocious as to deny all possibility of happiness in that of the next; were doomed to everlasting perdition, but had the power given them by infernal spirits to be for a while the scourge of the living.

  This was done by allowing the wicked spirit to enter the body of another person at the moment their own soul had winged its flight from earth; the corpse was thus reanimated – the same look, the same voice, the same expression of countenance, with physical powers to eat and drink, and partake of human enjoyments, but with the most wicked propensities, and in this state they were called vampires. This second existence as it may not improperly be termed, is held on a tenure of the most horrid and diabolical nature. Every All-Hallow E’en, he must wed a lovely virgin, and slay her, which done, he is to catch her warm blood and drink it, and from this draught he is renovated for another year, and free to take another shape, and pursue his Satanic course; but if he failed in procuring a wife at the appointed time, or had not opportunity to make the sacrifice before the moon set, the vampire was no more – he did not turn into a skeleton, but literally vanished into air and nothingness.