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Title details for Dracula's Guest by Michael Sims - Available

Dracula's Guest

A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

by Michael Sims
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Before Twilight and True Blood, even before Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula.
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. Readers of Dracula's Guest may also enjoy Michael Sims' most recent collection, The Dead Witness: A Connossieur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories.

  • Creators

  • Series

    The Connoisseur's Collections

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 1, 2010

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780802778987

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780802778987
      • File size: 660 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from April 15, 2010
      Sims, editor of this brilliant collection, gathers stories of the undead written during what he loosely terms the Victorian era. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901, although the range of these published tales is wider, approximately 1738 to 1890. In an entertaining introduction, he writes of the themes and images that occur in this collection: the bloodsuckers presented here are predators who can be turned away only by Christian symbols, garlic, and little else. Do not expect sparkling "Twilight" vampires or even the good-guy types that sometimes appeared in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" franchise. Stories include classics by such writers as Lord Byron, Bram Stoker, and M.R. James, as well as lesser-known authors like Johann Ludwig Tieck and Thophile Gautier. The anthology is arranged to show how vampire tales and myths evolved. The last story, Stoker's "Dracula's Guest," was never part of the novel, but it still has that wonderful, over-the-top atmosphere. VERDICT An excellent addition to popular fiction and literature collections.Patricia Altner, Biblioinfo.com, Columbia, MD

      Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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