Rennison The Rivals of Dracula

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84344-633-0
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Bram Stoker's Dracula, still the most famous of all vampire stories, was first published in 1897. But the bloodsucking Count was not the only member of the undead to bare his fangs in the literature of the period. Late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is full of vampires and this anthology of scary stories introduces modern readers to fifteen of them. A travel writer in Sweden unleashes something awful from an ancient mausoleum. A psychic detective battles a vampire that has taken refuge in an Egyptian mummy. A nightmare becomes reality in the tower room of a gloomy country house. The Rivals of Dracula is a collection of classic tales to chill the blood and tingle the spine, including the following stories: Alice & Claude Askew - 'Aylmer Vance and the Vampire' EF Benson - 'The Room in the Tower' Mary Cholmondeley - 'Let Loose' Ulric Daubeny - 'The Sumach' Augustus Hare - 'The Vampire of Croglin Grange' Julian Hawthorne - 'Ken's Mystery' E and H Heron - 'The Story of Baelbrow' MR James - 'Count Magnus' Vernon Lee - 'Marsyas in Flanders' Richard Marsh - 'The Mask' Hume Nisbet - 'The Vampire Maid' Frank Norris - 'Grettir at Thorhall-stead' Phil Robinson - 'Medusa' HB Marriott Watson - 'The Stone Chamber'

NICK RENNISON is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He is the editor of six anthologies of short stories for No Exit Press: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Rivals of Dracula, Supernatural Sherlocks, More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock's Sisters and American Sherlocks, plus A Short History of Polar Exploration, Peter Mark Roget: A Biography, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Robin Hood: Myth, History & Culture and Bohemian London, published by Oldcastle Books. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His crime novels, Carver's Quest and Carver's Truth, both set in nineteenth-century London, are published by Corvus. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rennison, Nick

Leseproben

Introduction

In 1897, the Irish author Bram Stoker published a novel which has become the most famous of all vampire stories. The novel was, of course, Dracula. It is almost needless to note that Stoker did not invent the figure of the vampire. Indeed, belief in creatures which return from the grave to prey upon their living victims or which suck the blood and the life from human beings seems to have existed for millennia. The Edimmu in Sumerian mythology, the Strix in Ancient Greece and Rome, the Vetala in Hindu mythology all have attributes that link them to the vampire. Fast forward to Europe in the Middle Ages and there are plenty of stories of vampire-like creatures from England to Hungary. They continued to be recorded for several centuries and, even in the supposedly enlightened eighteenth century, reports of real-life vampires flooded out of Eastern Europe. The idea of vampirism seems to have been particularly strong in Slavic folklore and it was in Transylvania that Stoker chose to place the homeland of his own vampire.

The name ‘Dracula’ he took from a historical figure, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, born in 1431. Vlad’s father had been given the honorary name of ‘Dracul’ (the Wallachian word for ‘dragon’) and Vlad was described as ‘Dracula’ or ‘son of the dragon’. Schooled in the brutal politics of Eastern Europe in the mediaeval era, Vlad Dracula was renowned for the bloodthirsty punishments he inflicted on his enemies. During several spells as ruler, which finally ended with his death in battle in 1476, he gained the nickname Vlad the Impaler because of his fondness for impaling those who opposed him on wooden stakes and leaving their bodies to terrorise any others who might think of taking up arms against him. One chronicler reports seeing twenty thousand men, women and children who had suffered this punishment. After his death, Vlad Dracula rapidly became a byword for cruelty and books describing his misdeeds with alluring titles like The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula were published in the Balkans and further afield. Some scholars claim that Vlad Dracula has been unjustly stigmatised. His cruelties were no worse than those of many other mediaeval rulers whose reputations have not suffered as his has done. In Romania he is seen as a significant figure in the nation’s history who built a strong and independent state of Wallachia and defended it against the Turks. In the rest of the world he is fated to be remembered because, one day in the 1890s, Bram Stoker read of him in a history of Eastern Europe and decided to borrow his name for the vampiric anti-hero of a novel he was writing.

Stoker did not invent the vampire and nor was he the first writer to make use of the creature in his work. The literary vampire first makes an appearance in eighteenth-century poetry, originally in Germany and, towards the end of the century, in England. An obscure German poet, Heinrich August Ossenfelder, published ‘Der Vampir’ in 1748, a short poem which reflected interest at the time in a series of reports from Eastern Europe and the Balkans of vampire activity in the Austrian Empire. Ossenfelder seems to have introduced the vampire into European literature and other German poets, most notably Goethe in ‘The Bride of Corinth’, followed his example. In England, a vampire is a peripheral character in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer and Coleridge’s unfinished Christabel can be interpreted as a vampire romance.

Romantic poets also had a role to play in the appearance of the vampire in prose fiction. In the summer of 1816, Byron and Shelley, together with Shelley’s soon-to-be wife Mary, were staying at the Villa Diodati in the Swiss village of Cologny. Conversation turned frequently to the supernatural and all three began to write stories on the subject. The only one that was finished was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, Byron did produce a fragment of a novel, which found its way into print (against the poet’s wishes) in 1819. What was published does suggest that Byron intended to write a vampire story and his personal physician John Polidori, who was also present at the Villa Diodati, took inspiration from what little had been written. Polidori created his own supernatural tale which was published as The Vampyre in the same year. Confusingly, it first appeared under Byron’s name, presumably in order to increase its commercial appeal, but Polidori soon laid claim to it and his authorship was acknowledged in later editions.

Polidori followed romantic tradition by dying young in 1821 at the age of only twenty-five but his book lived on. In the words of Christopher Frayling, in an introduction to a 1990s anthology of vampire literature, his novella is ‘the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre’. It was popular enough to be plagiarised in copycat stories, adapted into plays and even set to music. Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr of 1828 took one of the dramas cobbled together from Polidori’s work and transformed it into an opera which is still occasionally performed today. Over the next decade and a half there were one or two noteworthy examples of vampire literature (the 1841 Russian novella Oupyr by Alexei Tolstoy, a distant cousin of the more famous Leo, is an interesting curiosity) but the most significant development came in the mid-1840s.

At the time, a new audience for cheap, sensationalist reading matter was developing and the so-called ‘penny dreadful’ had emerged to cater for it. One of the most successful of the penny dreadful serials, first published between 1845 and 1847 and eventually running to more than half a million words, was Varney the Vampire. Most probably written by a prolific hack author named James Malcolm Rymer (who may also have had a hand in the first story to feature the demon barber Sweeney Todd) this was what a recent writer has described as ‘a rambling gore-fest’ in which the vampire Sir Francis Varney regularly indulges his lust for human blood. Actually sub-titled ‘The Feast of Blood’, Varney’s bloodsucking adventures were immensely popular with their target readership (broadly speaking, the newly literate urban working class) and introduced a number of standard ideas about fictional vampires that have survived to the present day. Varney was, for example, one of the first vampires to come equipped with fangs, the better to get at his favourite sustenance. In pursuit of one victim, he ‘seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth – a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows’.

Across Europe in the decades to follow, writers produced vampire novels. Some were as lurid as the tales of Varney; others were more subtle and sophisticated. The French novelist Paul Féval, a rival of Dumas in historical fiction, wrote a trilogy (Le Chevalier Ténèbre, La Vampire and La Ville Vampire) which has been translated into English by the science fiction and horror writer Brian Stableford; in Germany the prolific travel writer and novelist Hans Wachenhusen published Der Vampyr in 1878 which is set in Bulgaria under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and features a former Orthodox priest as its villain.

In English, the best-known vampire fiction by far of this period is Carmilla, a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu which was serialised in a magazine in 1871 and published in a collection of short works entitled In a Glass Darkly the following year. Born into a Huguenot family long resident in Dublin and related on his mother’s side to the playwright Sheridan, Le Fanu trained as a lawyer but soon turned to journalism and fiction. He published more than a dozen novels, including Uncle Silas and The House by the Church Yard, and became renowned for his ghost stories. Carmilla, with its tale of the unsettling relationship between the narrator Laura and the enigmatic title character, was not the first work of vampire fiction in which the main vampiric protagonist is female but it has become the most influential. On screen, it has provided the inspiration for a wide variety of works from Hammer horror films to YouTube web series. And in the two decades immediately after its publication it influenced other writers, including most notably Le Fanu’s fellow Irishman Bram Stoker. Names in the later novel echo the earlier book (Rheinfeldt in Carmilla, Renfield in Dracula); the lonely castle in Styria which is the setting for Le Fanu’s story is pushed even further east and made even more remote when it is reimagined as Dracula’s castle in Stoker’s novel; the descriptions of the vampiric women in the two tales (Carmilla in the earlier work, Lucy Westenra in the later) are similar. Ideas about repressed sexual desire, implicit in Dracula, are, bearing in mind the constraints of the Victorian era, closer to the surface in Le Fanu’s book. And, even more shockingly, the desires are lesbian.

Dracula very clearly drew on Le Fanu’s earlier book but it contains the vampire who would soon overshadow all other literary vampires. Who exactly was its creator? Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 and originally worked as a civil servant in the city. His first published book was the less than exciting volume, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. In 1876, Stoker, a great theatre-lover, met the legendary Victorian actor Henry Irving and, two years later, he gave up his civil service...