num_pages: 467
description: Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the Victorian era-from England America France Germany Transylvania and even Japan-into a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley the stories range from Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla to Guy de Maupassant's The Horla and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 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.Vampires captivated the Victorians as Sims reveals in his insightful introduction: In 1867 Karl Marx described capitalism as dead labor which vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor; while in 1888 a London newspaper invoked vampires in trying to explain Jack the Ripper's predations. At a time when vampires have been re-created in a modern context Dracula's Guest will remind readers young old and in between of why the undead won't let go of our imagination.
language: English
title: Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories
publisher: Walker Books