Otto Penzler - The Vampire Archives

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Otto Penzler (ed.) - The Vampire Archives - The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published (Quercus, UK: Random House, USA, 2009)

Foreword - Kim Newman
Preface - Neil Gaiman
Introduction - Otto Penzler


PRE-DRACULA

M. E. Braddon - Good Lady Ducayne
William Gilbert - The Last Lords of Gardonal
Anne Crawford - A Mystery of the Campagna
Eliza Lynn Linton - The Fate of Madame Cabanel
Mary Cholmondeley - Let Loose
Vasile Alecsandri - The Vampire
Ambrose Bierce - The Death of Halpin Frayser
Julian Hawthorne - Ken's Mystery
Sheridan Le Fanu - Carmilla
F. G. Loring - The Tomb of Sarah
Edgar Allan Poe - Ligeia
Hume Nisbet - The Old Portrait
Hume Nisbet - The Vampire Maid

TRUE STORIES

Eric Count Stenbock - The Sad Story of a Vampire
Luigi Capuana - A Case of Alleged Vampirism
Franz Hartmann - An Authenticated Vampire Story

GRAVEYARDS, CASTLES, CHURCHES, RUINS

Carl Jacobi - Revelations in Black
Anne Rice - The Master of Rampling Gate
Frederick Cowles - The Vampire of Kaldenstein
M. R. James - An Episode of Cathedral History
D. Scott-Moncrieff - Schloss Wappenburg
H. P. Lovecraft - The Hound
Tanith Lee - Bite-Me-Not Or, Fleur De Fur
Joseph Payne Brennan - The Horror at Chilton Castle
Algernon Blackwood - The Singular Death of Morton
Clark Ashton Smith - The Death of Ilalotha

THAT'S POETIC

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - The Bride of Corinth
Lord Byron - The Giaour
John Keats - La Belle Dame Sans Merci

HARD TIMES FOR VAMPIRES

Charles Beaumont - Place of Meeting
Ed Gorman - Duty
David J. Schow - A Week in the Unlife

CLASSIC TALES

Victor Roman - Four Wooden Stakes
E. F. Benson - The Room in the Tower
E. F. Benson - Mrs. Amworth
Basil Copper - Doctor Porthos
F. Marion Crawford - For the Blood Is the Life
M. R. James - Count Magnus
Manly Wade Wellman - When It Was Moonlight
August Derleth - The Drifting Snow
Alice and Claude Askew - Aylmer Vance and the Vampire
Bram Stoker - Dracula's Guest
Algernon Blackwood - The Transfer
H. B. Marriott Watson - The Stone Chamber
Jan Neruda - The Vampire
Clark Ashton Smith - The End of the Story

PSYCHIC VAMPIRES

D. H. Lawrence - The Lovely Lady
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite
Harlan Ellison - Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time

SOMETHING FEELS FUNNY

Fredric Brown - Blood
Stephen King - Popsy
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Werewolf and the Vampire
Richard Matheson - Drink My Red Blood
Roger Zelazny - Dayblood

LOVE . . . FOREVER

Lisa Tuttle - Replacements
Frederick Cowles - Princess of Darkness
Garry Kilworth - The Silver Collar
Walter Starkie - The Old Man's Story
Vincent O'Sullivan - Will
Dion Fortune - Blood-Lust
Everil Worrell - The Canal
Mary A. Turzillo - When Gretchen Was Human
Lafcadio Hearn - The Story of Chugoro

THEY GATHER

Steve Rasnic Tem - The Men & Women of Rivendale
Tanith Lee - Winter Flowers
Brian Stableford - The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady
F. Paul Wilson - Midnight Mass

IS THAT A VAMPIRE?

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
Sabine Baring-Gould - A Dead Finger
M. R. James - Wailing Well
Clive Barker - Human Remains
Sydney Horler - The Vampire
Hugh B. Cave - Stragella
Vernon Lee - Marsyas in Flanders
Guy De Maupassant - The Horla
Fritz Leiber - The Girl With the Hungry Eyes

THIS IS WAR

Robert Bloch - The Living Dead
Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann - Down Among the Dead Men

MODERN MASTERS

Brian Lumley - Necros
Ray Bradbury - The Man Upstairs
Manly Wade Wellman - Chastel
Peter Tremayne - Dracula's Chair
Richard Laymon - Special
Dan Simmons - Carrion Comfort
Gahan Wilson - The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be

Daniel Seitler - The Vampire: A Bibliography

commented on several of these before on such threads as The Penguin Book Of Vampire Stories, Dracula’s Brood: and The Rivals Of Dracula to name but three, mainly because it's been culled from just about every vampire anthology to be published in the last fifty years, but will try fill in some gaps before this has to go back to library.

incidentally, back in the 'nineties, Chicago-based Jule Ghoul ran a monthly fanzine named Vampire Archives which attempted to keep readers up to date with all the fang-face related action in the worlds of books, films, shows, fandom, etc. It was dead useful. Came in a black envelope and you got a Vampire Archives biro if you took out a sub. which, obviously, i did. See all that red on the cover? That's glitter, that is.

[David A. Riley]

Intrigued to see this, dem, as Otto Penzler has another anthology due next year: The Zombie Archives, in which one of my early stories, After Nightfall, will be reprinted.

Otto Penzler, as well has been a prolific editor, also owns a New York bookshop, The Mysterious Bookshop www.mysteriousbookshop.com/.

David

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" .. the nearest literature has yet come to creating George Romero's cinematic effects in words."

Hugh Lamb on After Nightfall in his essay Zombies, The Penguin Encyclopedia Of Horror & The Supernatural (1986).

Would appreciate it if you'd keep us posted on the Zombie book, Mr. R. it looks like Otto's attempting to outdo Stephen Jones and his Mammoth's. The Vampire Archive runs to 1214 pages! Daniel Sietler's bibliography accounts for over a hundred of them.

[David A. Riley]

Will do, dem.

It will be interesting - to me at least - what category my story is slotted in.

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Peter Tremayne - Dracula's Chair: The narrator's wife purchased it from an Essex antique dealer who'd landed it when the furniture from a certain asylum in Purfeet went to auction. Our man takes an instant dislike to the ugly chair, but to avoid arguments, dumps it in his study. It is more comfortable than he'd suspected, and he dozes off .... to reawaken in Cairfax Abbey as drooling, straitjacketed lunatic Upton Welford (the debonair Victorian gent turned vampire hunter in Tremayne's novel, The Revenge Of Dracula). Kindly Dr. Seward is striving in vain to cure his patients 'delusion' that he's being persecuted by vampires. To make matters worse, Dracula is determined to prolong his fiendish revenge on Welford over several nights.

Originally written as the epilogue to The Revenge Of Dracula but Tremayne reconsidered and gave it to - what was he thinking ?!!!- the C**nt Dr*cula F** Club for use in one of their publications instead.

Harlan Ellison - Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time: From swinger Anne's funeral, Mitch heads direct for Dynamite singles bar for another night on the pull. He's not quite his hedonistic self this evening. Why did Anne top herself?

Tonight it's Mitch's turn to be picked up, a gorgeous blond creature who, like him, doesn't believe in small talk, invites him back to her flat for some red hot action. She is, of course, a vampire with a nasty gimmick: she drains the contentment from her victims, replaces it with a lethal dose of crushing loneliness from her vast reservoir of same.

Everil Worrell - The Canal: (Weird Tales, Dec 1927). Morton is a man much given to solitary midnight strolls and is delighted when he comes upon a stretch of canal-way outside the sleeping city, even more-so when a strange and beautiful young woman calls to him from across the water. He offers to cross to her side but she is horrified at the suggestion. Instead, she will come to him some nights from now when the water has drained into the loch. The girl (unnamed throughout) explains that she lives here with her father and must keep watch by night as he does by day, for they have suffered persecution and been driven from the city. Morton has already fallen in love with this charming creature and unwisely vows to do her will in all things, learning too late that she is the girl in whose cabin a child's mutilated corpse was discovered, hence her flight. By the time she crosses the canal, Morton is aware that she is a vampire, and neither can disguise their hatred for the other. But he's given his word and must carry her across the bridge where she feasts upon the first unlucky stranger she asks for help while he watches jealously from the shadows. Morton realises he must destroy her, but first he wants to taste the vampire's bloody kiss.

"Do you think you would be helping me to tie me to a desk, to shut me behind doors away from freedom, away from the delight of doing my own will, of seeking my own way? Rather this old boat, rather a deserted grave under the stars for my home!"

A positive feeling of kinship with this strange being whose face I had hardly seen possessed me. So I myself might have spoken, so I had often felt though I had never dreamed of putting my thoughts so forcibly. My regular and daytime life was a thing little thought of. I really lived only in my nocturnal prowling. The girl was right. All life should be free!"

A half century later, throw in wearing a neat leather jacket and a spiky haircut and that would be mantra of The Lost Boys.

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D. Scott-Moncrieff - Schloss Wappenburg: Uncle Ian recalls his Austrian adventure in 1904 when his motor car (a Merecedes, capable of up to "a spanking forty miles an hour") broke down near GrossKruetz, leaving he and passenger Archie no option but to spend the night at the decrepit, bat-infested but otherwise seemingly abandoned Schloss by the disused churchyard. As they inspect the graves - the last person to have been buried here was the Gräfin Wappenburg in 1778 - a creepy servant from the Schloss approaches them with an invitation to dinner. The present day Countess - senile, semi-mummified, skull faced, etc. - comes as a bit of a shock, but her gorgeous granddaughter, the Countess Sophie, makes up for any disappointment. During the night Ian awakens from a terrible dream, desperate for a smoke but out of matches. He sneaks into Archie's room for a light to find his friend hard at it with the leather-winged Countess Sophie - or at least, he would be if he hadn't already lost consciousness along with a great deal of blood! Having exhausted his Giant Book of Vampire cliches, Scott-Moncrieff dips into his Giant Book of Ghost cliches to round things off.

Bibliography: I spent some hours leafing through Daniel Seitler's expansive bibliography at back of The Vampire Archives - yeah, I so know how to live - and was delighted to find that some neglected minor classics from relatively obscure vampire zines get a look in: Ariel Smith, Amanda Clay & Melissa Bosco-Torchio's The Vampire Letters from Thomas J. Strauch's Coven Journal includes a glorious sequence where-in a seriously outraged vampire puts the fang on a bunch of Yuppie slime barbie Goths for behaving disrespectfully in her favourite cemetery. Kenneth King's pulpy WWII adventure They Must Feed from Velvet Vampire is like The Keep in miniature. There's Chad Savage's Cowboy's Lament and Takes One To Know One (Coven Journal again: it only ran to four issues but seems Otto Penzler's listed all the fiction content): Lisa Baglini's Equus Vampire (Nocturnal Ecstasy), Adam Nicke's The Lake from Miss Lucy Westenra's Society Of The Undead ... actually, some of these publications are so off the beaten track not even their editors know they exist. Call me mr. big softie, but i find it heartening to see these good people commemorated in print next to Bram Stoker & Co. At least one GLARING omission: Ken Cowley's Dracula Reflects (Dark Horizons #18, 1978: Necropolis #7, Feb. 1992), reckoned by Brian J. Frost to be "the most controversial vampire story written by a British author in the 'seventies" and overdue a second exhumation.