In Richard Dalby’s Dracula’s Brood, Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker (1987) he lists the nine stories that are so familiar, because they have anthologized so many times before, that he chooses to pass on them. I could have suggested a few others but over-all I think he pegs it pretty well.
You might have an idea which he chose: their are countless classics from the pages of Weird Tales and Strange Tales. There are any number written after the Pulps for magazines or anthologies. But let’s be honest, these over-used tales are going to be Victorian or Edwardian stories. The longer you’ve been around, the more opportunity you’ve had to be put into collections. And Dalby should know! He has Dracula’s Brood but also Vampire Stories (1992), and Vintage Vampire Stories (2011). I suspect he is pretty familiar with the well-picked over corpses of old anthologies.
I think we can say with certainty that Dalby’s list of over-used tales is The Vampires’ Greatest Hits.
He lists them in this order:
“The Vampyre” by Dr. John Polidori (1819) was originally attributed to Lord Byron but was actually written by his doctor. Polidori was one of the famous Lake Diodati crowd along with Mary Shelley who grew Frankenstein out of that wet, cold summer. Polidori brings the Lord Byron mystique into vampire fiction with his Lord Ruthven, a thinly veiled parody of his employer. Before Polidori, vampires of withered and ghostly and icky. Afterwards: sexy! Listen to it here!
“Carmilla” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (In a Glass Darkly, 1872) was the fifth and final segment in the cases of Dr. Martin Hesselius, the occult detective. He would influence later vampire-hunters like Dr. Van Helsing. This tale has a young woman fall under the power of a visitor, a beautiful woman named Carmilla. The lesbian undertones were not lost on anyone. The story was the basis of the film. The Vampire Lovers (1970) from American International. Listen to it here.
“Wake Not the Dead” by Johann Ludwig Tieck (Taschenbuch für das Jahr, 1823) has Walter marry Brunhilda but she dies. He remarries a woman named Swanhilda and has children with her. He doesn’t really care for Swan or the kids, so he lets a necromancer bring Brunhilda back. She’s a vampire and snacks on Walter and his kids. He is forced to put the vampire down but remains haunted to the end. Listen to it here.
“For Blood Is the Life” by F. Marion Crawford (Collier’s, December 16, 1905) appeared in the Christmas edition of the magazine. The narrator visits an artist friend who shows him a grave with a phantom. We get the back story: a gypsy girl named Cristina was killed by robbers and became a vampire. She haunts her love Angelo, whom the robbers made penniless. He has vampire sex with her on her grave. She slowly drains his blood until he finally escapes. Listen to it here.
“The Tomb of Sarah” by F. G. Loring (The Pall Mall Magazine, December 1900) is a one-off classic that follows a similar plot to the killing of Lucy Westerna in Dracula. Two men discover a vampire and kill her. It’s a classic but I always feel it is too soft. But then I grew up reading EC Comics and reading Weird Tales. For more on this story, go here. Listen to it here.
“Mrs. Amworth” by E. F. Benson (Hutchinson’s Magazine, June 1922) is pretty traditional story. In an area where people are suffering from mysterious anemia, a widow named Amworth resides over garden parties and pleasant company. Francis Urcombe figures out she is a vampire and thinks her dead after an accident. She isn’t, of course, and he has to do it the old-fashioned way. What made the story so unusual was the character of Mrs. Amworth, who isn’t Morticia in a castle but a sociable and friendly woman. It was filmed in 1975. Listen to it here.
“The Room in the Tower” by E. F. Benson (The Pall Mall Magazine, January 1912) has a man dreaming of a room in a tower and a woman named Stone. Eventually he visits some friends who have a tower. They find portrait of Mrs. Stone. When they move it, their hands are covered in blood. The narrator sleeps in the tower and Mrs. Stone appears. She is a vampire. She wants to turn him into one, too. He escapes when his friends rush in. The portrait is back on the wall. Later we learn that Mrs. Stone was an evil woman who when buried, her coffin would reappear above ground each morning. She was finally buried in unconsecrated ground. Listen to it here.
“Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker (Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, 1914) was actually written back in 1897 or earlier. It is the first chapter to Dracula that Stoker eliminated because the book was too long. It’s a great werewolf/vampire classic with Jonathan Harker getting lost in a graveyard full of vampiric spirits. He is saved by a wolf that is Dracula, of course. This was the portion of the book that tipped its hat to J. Sheridan Le Fanu because one of the tombstones refers to Styria, the location of “Carmilla”. Listen to it here. Listen to Orson Welles do Dracula here.
Excerpts from Varney the Vampyre” by Prest/Rymer (1847) is oldest of a certain type of vampire tale here. It is always excerpted (usually the first portion) because it is two hundred and thirty-two chapters long. It wasn’t a novel but a Penny Dreadful, a newspaper style publication that sold the story a drop at a time. While the upper crust were buying “The Vampyre”, the common working folk were reading this “Feast of Blood” one installment at a time. The authorship has been contested between Prest and Rymer, but who really cares? The gigantic epic is basically unreadably long. Listen to Chapter One here.
When we look at this list I note that the oldest is “The Vampyre” (1819) which isn’t surprising, since it really started the whole vampire thing in the UK. The newest is E. F. Benson’s “Mrs. Amworth” which was Benson’s way of trying to modernize the ghost story. Just in time for the Pulps!When you think of that, with the thousands of vampire tales told since, no one has made it onto this list since 1922. That a hundred and one years.
For comic book versions of “Carmilla” and “Dracula’s Guest”, go here.
Conclusion
Now we all have other stories that come to mind as well. “The Vampire” by Jan Neruda, “Revelations in Black” by Carl Jacobi, “The Cloak” by Robert Bloch, “When It Was Moonlight” by Manly Wade Wellman, etc. etc. etc. We will have to wait another century to see which of these survives the forgotten pages of the anthologists.
My own little vampire tale is “What Child Is This?” from Ghoultide Greetings. I wrote it about my dad’s dad who was a trapper in Alberta most of his life. I wrote the story for my father, who read it and shook his head. He liked it until the vampire shows up. (There are actually three Strange Northerns in this book!) Well, I come from pretty practical stock. Dad would have preferred if I wrote DIY car manuals. Instead, he got two sons (T. Neil Thomas, my bro!) that prefer the ghostly and fantastic to car parts.
