Friday, November 26, 2021

Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1849 Now in Hardback


Just in time for the holidays, The Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1850 is now available in for the first time in hardcover. You can buy it on Amazon for $18.98 with free Prime shipping: https://amzn.to/32sfNl2

An anthology award finalist in the International Book Awards, this collection unleashes the greatest early vampire tales in the English language. Unearthed from long forgotten journals and magazines, Andrew Barger has found the very best vampire short stories from the first half of the 19th century. They are collected for the first time in this groundbreaking book on the origins of vampire lore.

The cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language is the first half of the 19th century. Andrew Barger combed forgotten journals and mysterious texts to collect the very best vintage vampire stories from this crucial period in vampire literature. In doing so, Andrew unearthed the second and third vampire stories originally published in the English language, neither printed since their first publication nearly 200 years ago. Also included is the first vampire story originally written in English by John Polidori after a dare with Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. The book contains the first vampire story by an American who was a graduate of Columbia Law School. The book further includes the first vampire stories by an Englishman and German, including the only vampire stories by such renowned authors as Alexander Dumas, Théophile Gautier and Joseph le Fanu.

As readers have come to expect from Andrew, he has added his scholarly touch to this collection by including story backgrounds, annotations, author photos and a foreword titled "With Teeth." The ground-breaking stories are:

1819 The Vampyre - John Polidori (1795-1821)
1823 Wake Not the Dead - Ernst Raupach (1784-1852)
1848 The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains - Alexander Dumas (1802-1870)
1839 Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter - Joseph le Fanu (1814-1873)
1826 Pepopukin in Corsica - Arthur Young (1741-1820)
1819 The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo - Robert C. Sands (1799-1832)
1836 Clarimonde - Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)


#BlackFridayHorrorBook #VampireTales #Vampirestories #vampireshortstories #horroranthology #horrorstories

Saturday, October 2, 2021

Poe Vampire Story -- Did He Write One???

 

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was the undisputed king of the early scary short story. He was ten when John Polidori published the first vampire story ("The Vampyre") in the English language. That groundbreaking story was followed a few months later by "The Black Vampyre," which was published anonymously by Robert Sands, valedictorian of Columbia University. Both caused quite a stir in the literary community and among readers at large due to their depraved horror. Many people thought Lord Byron wrote Polidori's tale. Lord Byron had to make a statement in the papers that he was not the author.


I published both of these vintage vampire stories, with detailed background information, in The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849 They are a must read for vampire aficionados. The latter tale launched a vampire Wikipedia page on the story itself.

But what about Edgar Allan Poe? Surely Poe heard of these stories and likely read one or both when he got older. Did he respond in kind with his own vampire tale? Sorry to disappoint, but from my research Poe does not appear to have penned a vampire story. If a reader has to stretch their imagination to determine if a character is a vampire, then it is likely not a vampire. After all, a vampire is what a vampire does.

Teeth play a telling role (as does the presence of blood) in many vampire tales. The ponderous dissertations that seek to attribute the protagonist’s lust for teeth to a vampire fixation in “Berenice” have felt chompy. A tooth fixation is not a blood fixation. Still, a number of anthologist have placed Poe’s “Ligeia” in their collections with hopes that if the tale is included in a vampire anthology, it will somehow be transmogrified into a vampire story. A Poe story listed in the Table of Contents for an anthology boosts sales. Nevertheless, in the case of vampire anthologies, Poe’s inclusion is misdirected. Now on to "Ligeia."

**Spoiler Alert** When Ligeia dies and is subsequently brought back to life through Rowena’s body, the unnamed protagonist touches her and she moves away, again displaying no lust for blood. Before her death, Rowena is given a cup of reddish liquid that could easily be wine or a potion concocted by the protagonist. There is no evidence that anyone’s blood was spilt. The only other hint of vampirism comes when Rowena’s lips part on her deathbed to display a line of “pearly teeth.” If she was a vampire we would learn of long teeth or sharp teeth, but that is not the case.

Poe’s only slight references to vampires were in his poems. “Tamerlane” references a vampire-bat and “To Helen” calls out vampire-winged panels. Articles about the vampire motif in “The Fall of the House of Usher” have been disorganized and unconvincing. There is no hint that Roderick Usher was a vampire. Essays about a volitional vampire in “Morella” have . . . well . . . sucked. 


Yes, it would be nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story. Read these important vampires tales in BlooDeath: The Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1849.


#EdgarAllanPoeVampire #PoeVampireStory #Ligeia #PoeVampireTale #PoeVampireStory #BestVampireStories

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Who Invented the Popular vampire Motifs that Vampires have no Reflection in a Mirror and cast no Shadow?

 


An astute reader, Erin McNulty, recently inquired on my Facebook page as to whether Alexandre Dumas "invented" the popular vampire motifs that vampires have no reflection in a mirror and cast no shadow. She wondered why it was in the text of my English translation of Dumas's "The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains" in the Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1849 collection that I edited. http://www.andrewbarger.com/bestvampirestories1800.html
This was an excellent question that sent me off in search of forgotten tomes on vampire lore, which is never a bad thing! What I learned is very interesting...
It appears that until 1975 readers believed Bram Stoker, in his fantastic novel Dracula, had created these two important vampire motifs. In 1975, however, an editor named Allan Hull Watson published The Horror at Fontenay that was supposedly a "long-lost Dumas novel." Consider this text from page 178:
"I don't know who or what is attacking you. But I have my suspicions. Did you ever notice anything peculiar about Kostaki?"
"Yes," I replied. "On at least two occasions he seemed to cast no shadow in bright light, while everyone else did! And on another occasion - although it may have been imagination on my part - he came into this room to ask if my women were sufficiently attentive. He was standing with his back to that mirror, and I could swear that his image was not reflected in it!"
That is a compelling storyline, but unfortunately it does not appear to be in the original French by Dumas in "The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains" and he did not write any novel or short story titled "The Horror at Fotenay." In my opinion the vampire motifs about not casting a shadow and no reflection in a mirror were inserted by Watson as complete embellishments to sell more books.
Bram Stoker appears to have "invented" these important vampire motifs in Dracula and they were not created decades earlier by Alexandre Dumas. The problem is solved and Stoker remains on his lofty pedestal.
Thank you, Erin, for keeping me honest in my research!

#bestvampirestories #vampirestories #classicvampiretales #vampirecarpathianmountains #vampires #classicvampirestories #bramstoker #alexandredumas

Best Vampire Short Story Anthology Now Available at Target.com

 

My classic vampire anthology, which was a finalist in the International Book Awards, is now available for purchase at Target.com. Unearthed from long forgotten journals and magazines, Andrew Barger has found the very best vampire short stories from the first half of the 19th century. They are collected for the first time in this groundbreaking book on the origins of vampire lore.

The cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language is the first half of the 19th century. I combed forgotten journals and mysterious texts to collect the very best vintage vampire stories from this crucial period in vampire literature. In doing so, I found the second and third vampire stories originally published in the English language, neither printed since their first publication nearly 200 years ago. Also included is the first vampire story originally written in English by John Polidori after a dare with Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. The book contains the first vampire story by an American who was a graduate of Columbia Law School. The book further includes the first vampire stories by an Englishman and German, including the only vampire stories by such renowned authors as Alexander Dumas, Théophile Gautier and Joseph le Fanu.

I added my scholarly touch to this collection by including story backgrounds, author photos and a foreword titled "With Teeth." The ground-breaking stories are:

1819 The Vampyre - John Polidori (1795-1821)

1823 Wake Not the Dead - Ernst Raupach (1784-1852)

1848 The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains - Alexander Dumas (1802-1870)

1839 Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter - Joseph Sheridan le Fanu (1814-1873)

1826 Pepopukin in Corsica - Arthur Young (1741-1820)

1819 The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo - Robert Sands (1799-1832)

1836 Clarimonde - Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)

Buy Best Vampire Short Stories at Target


#BestVampireStories #ClassicVampires #EarlyVampires #BargerVampireAnthology

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Amazon Book Coupon on Vampire Books

Take $5 off my books at Amazon when the purchase is $20 or more. Use coupon code NOVBOOK18 to get the deal through November 25th.


Two hundred years before "Game of Thrones" these fantasy stories started the genre. Read them tonight. Buy the paperback on Amazon for only $3.52 now!


A International Book Award finalist, these are the classic vampire tales that cannot be forgotten.



Andrew Barger's first short story collection is not to be missed.



#AmazonBookCoupon #AmazonCoupon

Saturday, March 10, 2018

Best Vampire Story Anthology Edited by Andrew Barger



With Teeth
by

As one might expect from the stories in this annotated, best vampire story anthology, teeth were used prominently in the nascent development of the vampirism mythos. And due to the human-monster theme, vampire stories developed more quickly and became more robust from both story and character development than other genres during the period in question, such as werewolf and ghost stories; so much so that they triumphed over most novels in this respect. Yet many claim that short stories are a lesser art form than the novel.

Does time bolster art and transform it into something more robust? Certainly as the aging of a Bordeaux brings out complexities of character unknown in newer wines, so too does the novel offer a bouquet of characters that are impossible to foster in the limited pages of a short story. Characters like certain wines take time to develop, and in this aspect deference must be given to the novel in whatever modern form it may take.

Where critics of short fiction often err, however, is assuming that more pages equate to greater literary art. It’s been claimed Earnest Hemmingway said that the phrase “Baby carriage for sale – slightly used” is the best thing he ever wrote.

The literary world is marred with dead trees and terrible, fat novels. Does length equal creativity and originality? Do pages equal greatness? Does size matter in fiction? Edgar Allan Poe, the same author who formed the foundation of the modern short story, claimed just the opposite. He preferred a complete tale that could be consumed in one sitting without interruption of the reader’s concentration.
And it was the same Edgar Allan Poe who likely never penned a vampire story given the research I conducted in Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems and Coffee with Poe: A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe’s Life. If a reader has to stretch their imagination to determine if a character is a vampire, then it is likely not a vampire.

Teeth play a telling role (as does the presence of blood) in many vampire tales. Because of this a number of anthologist have placed Poe’s “Ligeia” in their collections in the hopes that if the tale is put in a substantial number of vampire anthologies it will be transmogrified into a vampire story. This is certainly a misapplication in a story where the supposed vampire never comes in contact with another vampire. When Ligeia dies and is subsequently brought back to life through Rowena’s body, the unnamed protagonist touches her and she moves away, again displaying no lust for blood. Before her death, Rowena is given a cup of reddish liquid that could easily be wine or a potion concocted by the protagonist. There is no evidence that anyone’s blood was spilt. The only other hint of vampirism comes when Rowena’s lips part on her deathbed to display a line of “pearly teeth.”

Yes, it would be nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story. Poe’s only reference to vampires were in his poems. “Tamerlane” references a vampire-bat and “To Helen” calls out vampire-winged panels. Articles about the vampire motif in “The Fall of the House of Usher” have been disorganized and unconvincing. Essays about a volitional vampire in “Morella” have . . . well . . . sucked. The ponderous dissertations that seek to attribute the protagonist’s lust for teeth to a vampire fixation in “Berenice” have felt chompy. Vampires do not lust for teeth, rather blood. A Poe story listed in the Table of Contents for an anthology boosts sales. Nevertheless, in the case of vampire anthologies, Poe’s inclusion is misdirected.

Unlike the pure horror story genre in The Best Horror Short Stories 1800-1849, where Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote five of the dozen tales selected and the ghost story genre where Poe, Hawthorne and Irving collectively penned forty percent of tales in The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849, American writers (apart from one) are sadly lacking from authorship of the vampire stories for this period as they are for the werewolf genre. The top purveyors in these genres all hail from Europe apart from a few limited exceptions.
    
This makes sense given the rise of vampire legends throughout Europe, especially countries touching the Carpathian and Harz Mountains. In the April 1819 issue of the New Monthly Magazine “The Vampyre; A Tale” was published as the first vampire short story originating in the English language. The ruminations of a plot for the story were constructed by Lord Byron; yet it was fleshed out and ultimately written by John Polidori, his physician, on a literary dare. Lord Byron, in turn, got the idea from tradition and folktales. The state of the vampire legend before this story was best laid out in an article published in The Monthly Review of May 1819:

“The superstition, on which the tale is founded, universally prevailed less than a century ago, throughout Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland; and the legends to which it gave rise were not only believed, but were made the subject of learned disputations by the divines and physicians of the times. In Dr. Henry More’s Philosophical Works, and in Calmet’s Dissertation on Apparitions, may be found many interesting particulars relating to this fancy; and in the latter is an ample account of its origin and progress. It was imagined that men, who had been dead for some time, rose out of their graves and sucked the blood of their neighbours, principally the young and beautiful: that these objects of their attack became pale and livid, and frequently died; while the vampyres themselves, on their graves being opened, were found as fresh as if they were alive, and their veins full of good and florid blood, which also issued from the nose, mouth, and ears, and even through the very pores of the skin. The only mode of arresting the pranks of these tormentors was by driving a stake through the heart of the vampyre; a practice frequently adopted, and during the performance of which, we are told, he uttered a horrid groan. The body was then burned, and the ashes thrown into the grave.”

In John Polidori’s foreword to “The Vampyre” we learn that much of the vampire legend bubbled up through poetry and European legend as did many of the tales found in The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849. Yet not all of them. In 1679 “The Blood-Drinking Corpse” was published from a posthumous collection by Pu Songling (1640-1715) titled Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. He was an educator whose hobby, apparently, was to write down popular Chinese folktales. When he died he had collected nearly 500 of them. One of the first English translations was in 1913 and it can be presumed that none of the authors in this collection had access to it.

In response to “The Vampyre,” came the quick publication of “The Black Vampyre, a Legend of St. Domingo” by American, Robert Sands. And from there the vampire mythos fluttered off in the English language, darting from one short story to the next until in 1847 the novel Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood was serialized in a London Penny Dreadful. Fifty years later the world received one of the best horror books ever written--Dracula by Bram Stoker.

From folktales to poetry to short stories to novels, the vampire mythos has developed into the robust, character-driven genre we have today—and it has done so with teeth. In my anthology are what I consider the best vampire short stories published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the English language. I hope you enjoy them.

#BestVampireStories #ClassicVampireStories #VampireShortStories



Sunday, October 1, 2017

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write a Vampire Short Story?

Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was the undisputed king of the early scary short story. He was ten when John Polidori published the first vampire story ("The Vampyre") in the English language that was followed a few months later by "The Black Vampyre," which was published anonymously by Robert Sands, valedictorian of Columbia University. 

Both caused quite a stir in the literary community and among readers at large due to their depraved horror. Many people thought Lord Byron wrote Polidori's tale. Lord Byron had to make a statement in the papers that he was not the author.

I published both of these vintage vampire stories, with detailed background information, in The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849 and are a must read for vampire aficionados. 

But what about Edgar Allan Poe? Surely Poe heard of these stories and likely read one or both when he got older. Did he respond in kind with his own vampire tale? Sorry to disappoint, but from my research Poe did not pen a vampire story. If a reader has to stretch their imagination to determine if a character is a vampire, then it is likely not a vampire. After all, a vampire is what a vampire does.

Teeth play a telling role (as does the presence of blood) in many vampire tales. Because of this a number of anthologist have placed Poe’s “Ligeia” in their collections with hopes that if the tale is included in a substantial number of vampire anthologies it will be transmogrified into a vampire story. **Spoiler Alert** When Ligeia dies and is subsequently brought back to life through Rowena’s body, the unnamed protagonist touches her and she moves away, again displaying no lust for blood. Before her death, Rowena is given a cup of reddish liquid that could easily be wine or a potion concocted by the protagonist. There is no evidence that anyone’s blood was spilt. The only other hint of vampirism comes when Rowena’s lips part on her deathbed to display a line of “pearly teeth.” If she was a vampire we would learn of long teeth or sharp teeth, but that is not the case.

Poe’s only slight references to vampires were in his poems. “Tamerlane” references a vampire-bat and “To Helen” calls out vampire-winged panels. Articles about the vampire motif in “The Fall of the House of Usher” have been disorganized and unconvincing. There is no hint that Roderick Usher was a vampire. Essays about a volitional vampire in “Morella” have . . . well . . . sucked. The ponderous dissertations that seek to attribute the protagonist’s lust for teeth to a vampire fixation in “Berenice” have felt chompy. A tooth fixation is not a blood fixation.


Yes, it would be nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story. A Poe story listed in the Table of Contents for an anthology boosts sales. Nevertheless, in the case of vampire anthologies, Poe’s inclusion is misdirected. Read these important vampires tales in BlooDeath: The Best Vampire Short Stories 1800-1849.



#EdgarAllanPoeVampire #PoeVampireStory