Michael Sims - Dracula's Guest

[dem bones]

Michael Sims (ed.) - Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (Bloomsbury, 2010)

Victoria Sawdon

Michael Sims - Introduction: The Cost Of Living

Part One: The Roots

Jean-Baptise de Moyer, Marquis d'Argens - They Opened The Graves
Antoine Augustin Calmet - Dead Persons In Hungary
George Gordon, Lord Byron - The End Of My Journey
John Polidori - The Vampyre
Johann Ludwig Tieck (attributed [almost certainly wrongly]) - Wake Not The Dead
Theophile Gautier - The Deathly Lover

Part Two: The Tree

Aleksei Tolstoy - The Family Of The Vourdalak
James Malcolm Rymer - Varney The Vampyre (extract)
Fitz-James O'Brien - What Was It?
Anonymous - The Mysterious Stranger
Anne Crawford - A Mystery of the Campagna
Emily Gerard - Death And Burial - Vampires And Werewolves
Mary Cholmondeley - Let Loose
Eric Count Stenbock - A True Story of a Vampire
M. E. Braddon - Good Lady Ducayne
Augustus Hare - And The Creature Came In
F. G. Loring - The Tomb of Sarah
Hume Nisbet - The Vampire Maid

Part Three: The Fruit

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman - Luella Miller
M. R. James - Count Magnus
Alice and Claude Askew - Aylmer Vance and the Vampire
Bram Stoker - Dracula’s Guest

Acknowledgements
Bibliography & Further Reading

From the Blurb
Before Twilight and True Blood, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula.


Acclaimed author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Aleksei Tolstoy's tale of a vampire family to Fitz-James O'Brien's invisible monster to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sinister widow Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stoker's own Dracula's Guest - a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.

Highly derivative of Richard Dalby's Dracula's Brood to be sure, but you don't see too many copies of that floating around these days and as a "wean them off Twilight & True Blood and onto the juicy stuff" primer - like there's anything wrong with liking Twilight & True Blood? I seem to remember the taste police sneering at Buffy before they "reassessed" their opinion - this 470 pager has its merits. If you're wondering about unfamiliar titles, the extract from Varney is the opening chapter, Augustus Hare's is it's twin brother and usually reprinted as The Vampire Of Croglin Grange, while Theophile Gautier is represented by a new translation of the story better known to many of us as Clarimonde.

To Bloomsbury's great credit, they (along with Robinsons, Wordsworth - am sure there are others, and sincerely apologise if i'm struggling to think of them!) - are one of few UK mainstream publishers prepared to give supernatural & horror short stories the time of day. £18.99 may be a strain on the younger Twilight fans pocket money so good news that a paperback is either already available or imminent.

[jamesdoig]

Dem, is that Mick Sims of Maynard/Sims fame?

[dem bones]

Different person, James. This Michael Sims lives in Pennsylvania and has written non-fiction science and nature books. He also edits The Penguin Book Of Gaslight Crime and The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime. Here's his homepage

www.michaelsimsbooks.com/Home.htm

[ripper]

I am really not sure if I want to buy a copy of this one or not. Most of the stories in the "Roots" section are unfamiliar to me, but I already have copies of most of those in the other two sections in other anthologies. If I could pick up a cheap copy then I would probably get it for the "Roots" section, but having seen the contents list of Richard Dalby's Vintage Vampire Stories, that anthology looks like a better prospect for my particular circumstances as it contains far more tales of which I am unaware.

[franklinmarsh]

Bit cheesed off with this as I recently obtained an Arrow paperback of Stoker's Dracula's Guest (which handily rounds up the great man's other short stories). I'm fairly sure I can get the paperback locally cheap (ie under three quid) and I'm sorely tempted to have a copy of The Vampyre in a 'proper' book.

[ripper]

Much to my surprise, the book is available from a local library, so I will probably loan it and see how it goes before making a possible purchase.

[fritzmaitland]

Yes, indeedy, did turn up a different copy of this for the princely sum of £2.75 at a (now long gone) local bargain bookshop. And so to Mother Russia and her environs in the company of Aleksei (distant cousin of Leo) Tolstoy and The Family Of The Vourdalak for the 10th October story. The story is told by preposterous old bore the Marquis d'Urfe who has a very inflated opinion of his younger self and is trying to relive his youth with a gaggle of impressionable youth (mostly female - the old rake). Incensed by his latest doxy playing hard to get, the Marquis stumps off to Moldova after being presented with a cross by said concerned doxy. He shacks up with a cheery local family, just as Gorcha the patriarch is heading for the hills with a posse to lay low a Turkish bandit chieftain who is terrorising the countryside. The old boy gives his family the curious instruction to hold a funeral service for him if he's not back in ten days, but if he's back before that time limit, don't let him in the house. What does he know? The crafty old devil turns up exactly ten days after he left, so the family are uncertain what to do. The dog kicks off at him, and he orders it shot. Has he changed, or was it just the fact he had the severed head of the bandit with him. Vampiric mayhem is about to ensue, with the Marquis unwisely falling for the eldest daughter. There's even a chase at the end. Rather good stuff, even if the Marquis does drone on a bit.