'"Dracula's Guest invokes the dangerous shadows of Victorian culture, those dark places where passion, terror, pathos, and sorrow mingle and merge. Gathering together canonical works along with less familiar knockout masterpieces, Michael Sims has produced an anthology designed to keep us all up at night."'

- Maria Tatar, professor and chair of the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, and editor of The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales

Before Twilight and True Blood, even before Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel Dracula.

Acclaimed nonfiction author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest vampire stories of the Victorian era -- from England, America, France, Russia, Germany, and, of course, Romania -- into 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 rich and sinister window called Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitious, and rounds out the collection with Stoker's own Dracula's Guest -- a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.

In his inisightful introduction, Sims asks, Why did so many people believe that vampires were real? He explores the natural history of vampires, the real-death circumstances that led people to believe that the deceased were leaving their coffins at night and preying upon the living. Vampires captivated Victorian society, and these wonderful stories demonstrate how writers refined the raw ore of peasant superstitious into a whole vampire mythology of aristocratic decadence and innocence betrayed. Even in the twenty-first century, the undead still walk among us.

Condition: Pre-loved book. Minor yellowing of pages. Otherwise in good condition.

Format: Paperback
Year published: 2010
Pages: 467
Sub-genre: Horror, classics, short stories.
Imprint: Walker Publishing