Charles M Collins - A Feast of Blood

Charles M Collins (ed.) - A Feast of Blood: A Full-Course Dinner in Horror! (Avon, 1967: republished with a new cover and classier subtitle Nine Immortal Tales Of Vampire Terror By Masters Of The Macabre, Avon Vintage, 1969)



Dr. John William Polidori - The Vampyre
Bram Stoker - Dracula's Guest
Johann Ludwig Tieck - Wake Not the Dead
Carl Jacobi - Revelations in Black
D. Scott-Moncrieff - Schloss Wappenburg
E. F. Benson - The Room in the Tower
Richard Matheson - Blood Son
Clark Ashton Smith - A Rendezvous in Averoigne
Anonymous - The Mysterious Stranger

Blurb:
"Some like it very rare; others like it well done. Our ghoulish editor caters to all tastes - as long as it's a taste for blood. He serves up the cream of the clot from over two hundred horrible years of screaming terror. Come to dinner and meet the desolate husband who calls his dead wife back from the grave, or meet little Jules who wants to be a vampire when he grows up - if not before. You'll enjoy their company if you share their tastes and BRING YOUR OWN BLOOD!"

The type of anthology that drives a vampire obsessive bats. All of the stories are over-familiar from countless similar collections - bar one, necessitating the purchase of book for Scott-Moncrieff's yarn which, like as not, is only there to make up the numbers. Brian J. Frost's dismissal of Schloss Wappenburg as a prime example of the dire "trash" published in the immediate post-War years only adds to its desirability. To be fair to Collins, there wasn't exactly a proliferation of vampire theme antho's in the summer of love and this is a solid collection of bloodsuckers. For a blow by blow account of the action, read the excellent Curt Purcell at Groovy Age Of Horror.

As to Wake Not The Dead, friend Shroudeater, a man whose opinion I trust in such matters, advises me that it was NOT the work of Tieck but “it was written by Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach as Lasst Die Toten Ruhen, and it was published in 1823, not before”.