Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories
“Sims, editor of this brilliant collection, gathers stories of the undead written during what he loosely terms the Victorian era…. the bloodsuckers presented here are predators who can be turned away only by Christian symbols, garlic, and little else. Do not expect sparklingTwilightvampires or even the good-guy types that sometimes appeared in theBuffy the Vampire Slayerfranchise. An excellent addition to popular fiction and literature collections.” —Library Journal(starred review)“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 knock-out 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, author ofThe Annotated Classic Fairy TalesandEnchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood“In this fine new anthology, Michael Sims brings to bear his extensive knowledge of Victorian tales and their tellers on the vampire genre. Despite the title, Sims’s nets have caught fascinating material that pre-dates Dracula and the Victorians. Some will be familiar (excerpts from works by the Abbé Calmet, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Varney the Vampire, for example), but other authors and stories will be new to many, revealing an unexpected depth and breadth to the thrall of the undead. With a thoughtful introduction to the volume as well as each story, this book belongs in the crypt of every student of the creatures of the night!”—Leslie S. Klinger, editor ofThe New Annotated DraculaandThe New Annotated Sherlock Holmes“Everyone loves a good vampire story, but it takes a true aficionado with an insatiable thirst for knowledge to ferret out the roots of these monsters’ enduring appeal. There is no better guide to the natural history and mythology of the Undead than Michael Sims.”—Jennifer Ouellette, author ofThe Physics of the BuffyverseandBlack Bodies and Quantum Cats