Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  In recent decades vampire literature has been taken in new and interesting directions that expand the field away from its former primary locus in European and American representations. Canadian/Jamaican/Trinidadian author Nalo Hopkinson uses soucouyants (shape-shifting witch-vampires of Caribbean folklore) to explore ageing and community values in “Greedy Choke Puppy” (2001). African American author Tananarive Due’s series concerns underground African vampires known as the Life Brothers, who replay racism by treating mortals and women as worthless (The Living Blood, 2001). In its more radical form, the vampire is no longer abject, rejected with disgust to ensure identity (see Julia Kristeva, 1982, The Powers of Horror), but instead is a figure enabling recognition that the Other is constructed by and from a sense of self and personal fears. The vampire dramatizes endless potential for radical alternative behavior. Recent powerful examples are Moira Buffini’s play/film (the latter directed by Neil Jordan) Byzantium (2013), which exposes historical sexual predation on women, and in contemporary times a mother and daughter reversing relationships of power with the liberation offered by vampire natures, adopted through the powers of a soucouyant. Ana Lily Amirpour’s Persian-language film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), which was also adapted as a graphic novel (also 2014), likewise builds on the radical female vampire figure, depicting a chadur (like a burkha)-clad, motorbike-riding female vampire in Iran.

  Vampires are the epitome of metamorphosis. Transcending time, space, death, and the fixity of bodily shape, they are cultural indices of what is most questioned and feared, and they also offer radical potential to problematize whatever constrains, misrepresents, and denies.

  Gina Wisker

  See also: Byron, Lord; Carmilla; Carter, Angela; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Dracula; Due, Tananarive; Interview with the Vampire; Rice, Anne; Summers, Montague; Tem, Melanie; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.

  Further Reading

  Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  Bunson, Matthew. 2000. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books.

  Carter, Margaret L. 1989. The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

  Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

  Heldreth, Leonard G., and Mary Pharr, eds. 1999. The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

  Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Punter, David. 1999. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwells.

  Stoker, Bram. 1897. Dracula. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

  Tem, Steve Rasnic, and Melanie Tem. 1995. “Mama.” In Sisters of the Night, edited by Barbara Hambly and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Warner Books.

  “THE VAMPYRE”

  “The Vampyre,” an 8,000-word novelette that stands as the first vampire story in English literature, was written by Dr. John Polidori in 1816 near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, and was first published in The New Monthly Magazine for April 1, 1819. Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, had accompanied him to Lake Geneva and participated in the well-known ghost story contest during the wet summer of 1816, along with Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley.

  Mary Shelley’s contribution was Frankenstein. Byron wrote a fragment he intended to develop into a vampire story, but abandoned it after a few pages. Polidori began a novel, Ernestus Berchtold, but put it aside and later used Byron’s fragment and knowledge of his intended outline as his inspiration to write “The Vampyre” for a lady friend. It is more notable today for its historical importance and its influence than for its literary quality. He had not intended it for publication, but the manuscript, by unclear means, came to the attention of the editor Henry Colburn, who published it without Polidori’s knowledge or permission under Byron’s name. It created a sensation, largely due to Byron’s alleged authorship, despite protests by both Byron and Polidori. Colburn also published a chapbook version.

  Polidori had taken the prevalent eighteenth-century European folk belief in vampires, corpses that leave their graves to feed on the blood of nearby living relatives, and adapted it to a Romantic literary sensibility. His character, Lord Ruthven, is no walking corpse, but a mysterious aristocratic gentleman, widely traveled, unemotional, immoral, yet fatally seductive to women. He was an obvious caricature of Byron himself. The name Ruthven came from a biting caricature of Byron in the popular novel Glenarvon by Byron’s ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb.

  Polidori’s young protagonist, Aubrey, engages Ruthven as a mentor and tours Europe with him, but is soon appalled by his immoral behavior. Aubrey’s love interest, Ianthe, is found dead from the bite of a vampire. Ruthven is later wounded by robbers, and as he dies, makes Aubrey swear an oath not to tell anyone of his death. Then Aubrey discovers Ruthven is Ianthe’s murderer. Ruthven is brought back to life by moonlight, returns home, and courts Aubrey’s sister, driving the oath-bound Aubrey to insanity and death. Aubrey’s relationship with Ruthven has obvious parallels with Polidori’s relationship with Byron.

  “The Vampyre” was adapted for the French stage by Charles Nodier in 1819 and premiered as an opera in Leipzig in 1828. The story, with its image of a vampire as a seductive aristocrat, has been extremely influential, directly and indirectly, on all vampire fiction to follow, from Varney the Vampire (1845) through J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871–1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) down to the present day.

  Lee Weinstein

  See also: Byron, Lord; Carmilla; Dracula; Shelley, Mary; Vampires; Varney the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood.

  Further Reading

  MacDonald, D. L. 1991. Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of “The Vampyre.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

  Polidori, John W. 2005. John William Polidori: “The Vampyre” and Other Writings. Edited by Franklin Charles Bishop. Manchester: Carcanet Press.

  Senf, Carol A. 1988. “Polidori’s The Vampyre: Combining the Gothic with Realism.” North Dakota Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Winter): 197–208.

  VANDERMEER, JEFF (1968–)

  Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, an editor, and a publisher. He is best known for his cycle of stories and novels set in the fantastic city of Ambergris, for his Southern Reach trilogy of novels, and for his editorial work with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, with whom he produced a major attempt at establishing a canonical anthology of weird fiction.

  VanderMeer was born in Pennsylvania, but spent some of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked; this stay and the subsequent trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe had a formative impact on him, in particular on his early cycle of stories set in the fantastical city of Ambergris.

  The Ambergris stories, collected in City of Saints and Madmen (2001), also bear the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946–1959) and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence (1971–1985). They bring decadence and experimental techniques to the urban fantastic mode. Two subsequent Ambergris novels have followed, Shriek: An Afterword (2006), which expands on the structural gameplaying of the earlier stories, and Finch (2009), which modernizes Ambergris and introduces noir elements.

  VanderMeer’s publishing and editorial work with his wife Ann has also had a significant influence on the horror field. In 1997 his publishing house, Ministry of Whimsy Press, published Stepan Chapman’s award-wining The Troika, a novel that combines science fiction, surrealism, and body horror. Ministry of Whimsy Press has also published several anthologies of strange short fiction. With Ann, VanderMeer has edited a number of encyclopedic anthologies, most significantly The New Weird (2008) and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012). The New Weird was an attempt to represent a mode of the fantastic that had been su
ggested in an earlier online discussion, a mode primarily featuring urban settings and written by authors using experimental techniques to expand the possibilities of what weird fiction, and the fantastic in general, can do. In their introduction to The Weird, the VanderMeers set out a thesis that the Weird is a nebulous, hybrid mode, a form of the fantastic that has mutated through contact with other types of surreal, decadent, and experimental fiction.

  In 2014 VanderMeer published three novels, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, which form the Southern Reach Trilogy. These works bring together cosmic horror and environmental concerns, and describe the gradual encroachment of an alien wilderness zone, Area X, on the world. VanderMeer is a long-time resident of Florida, and this location is an influence on the setting of these books. In 2016 VanderMeer published the novel Borne, a hallucinogenic take on apocalyptic science fiction.

  VanderMeer’s work in breaking down generic boundaries and opening up possibilities in the weird horror field has been of profound significance. He has won the Nebula Award, Rhysling Award, British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, and three World Fantasy Awards, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: New Weird; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  VanderMeer, Jeff. 2008. “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’” Introduction to The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, ix–xviii. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon.

  VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff Vandermeer. 2011. Introduction to The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, xv–xx. London: Corvus.

  VARNEY THE VAMPIRE: OR, THE FEAST OF BLOOD

  Varney thea Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, is an influential English vampire narrative that appeared first as a series of penny dreadfuls in London between 1845 and 1847, when it was published as a book. One of the most popular of the Gothic horror narratives in Victorian England, Rymer and Prest’s narrative drew on earlier vampire conventions and introduced new ones, influencing later writers and filmmakers.

  Varney the Vampire is a long episodic tale of almost 900 pages that follows the adventures of Lord Francis Varney (the vampire) as he preys on a series of beautiful young daughters of aristocratic families in search of blood and wealth. In the course of 220 chapters, Varney stalks his victims through London, Bath, and the Continent, slowly becoming conscious of his own wretched fate and eventually committing suicide by throwing himself into Mt. Vesuvius.

  Both the penny dreadful of 108 issues and the novel were highly successful, entertaining readers with tales of a wicked upper-class monster. In addition, Varney’s self-awareness and despair at his condition made him sympathetic to Victorian readers, who could feel both horror of and sympathy for the vampire. Gothic horror, which combined pseudo-medieval settings with beautiful young women victimized by aristocratic men, or monsters, was a popular mid-nineteenth-century genre, and Rymer and Prest’s work is an excellent example of the form in both popularity and narrative excess. They also made popular the essential structure of the vampire narrative: an unknown evil appears and threatens the young innocent women of a family and/or community; as the heroine sickens, or dies, a group of men must discover the nature of the evil, figure out how to destroy it, and finally chase it down. In the traditional narrative they succeed, but in the sympathetic variant on the vampire narrative they fail.

  Like other penny dreadful writers, the authors of Varney were paid by the word, and as a result the narrative is full of long overwrought descriptions, convoluted plots, and formulaic language and imagery, the better to expand the word count. Despite these drawbacks, Varney remains important because the authors drew on earlier vampire narratives such as John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) and European folklore for aspects of the vampire’s character, while adding such new elements as superhuman strength, hypnotic power, the inability to eat or drink, and fangs that leave two marks in the victim’s neck. These new elements were passed on to later writers whose work established them as standard conventions of the vampire narrative. Rymer and Prest should also be credited with creating the first sympathetic vampire, a character who would become an essential part of horror literature in more polished works such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2014), and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2007).

  Jim Holte

  See also: Carmilla; Dracula; Penny Dreadful; Rice, Anne; Vampires; “The Vampyre.”

  Further Reading

  Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Sensf, Carol. 2013. The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature. New York: Ace.

  “The Vampire before Dracula.” 2005. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume, edited by Elizabeth Miller, 29–97. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 304. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  VATHEK

  Vathek is a Gothic novel by the English writer William Beckford, first published anonymously as An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript in 1786. Beckford claimed that it was originally composed in French, and that the published version was a translation by another hand, of which he disapproved. If that is true, he probably preferred to write in French partly as an affectation, partly because he obtained some assistance in its composition from Marianne Falque (ca. 1720–1785)—a defrocked nun forced to flee France by scandal, whose Oriental fantasy Abbassai (1753) is not dissimilar in style and manner, although far less excessive in its imagery—and partly because he feared that the book might not be publishable in English because it would be thought indecent.

  Beckford had inherited property worth a million pounds, including the accident-prone neo-Gothic monstrosity of Fonthill Abbey. The life he led there was rumored to be debauched, but a shortage of ready money forced him to sell it before its famous tower collapsed for the last time. As nearly as any Englishman, Beckford lived in a fabulous palace, furnished with everything he might desire, fully equipped for the contemplation of absolutes. No one else was ever as well placed to fantasize Vathek.

  The following passages come from the closing scene of Vathek, in which the title character, a fabulously wealthy and decadent caliph who has sold himself to the powers of darkness, arrives at the underworld with his mistress Neuronihar. They descend through a portal and find an immense subterranean hall ruled by the demon Eblis. They soon discover that their fate is to be eternally tormented.

  In the midst of this immense hall, a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts; without once regarding any thing around them. They had all, the livid paleness of death. Their eyes, deep sunk in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors, that glimmer by night, in places of interment. Some stalked slowly on; absorbed in profound reverie: some shrieking with agony, ran furiously about like tigers, wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other; and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert where no foot had trodden. (Beckford 1844, 543)

  . . . Almost at the same instant, the same voice announced to the Caliph, Nouronihar, the four princes, and the princess, the awful and irrevocable decree. Their hearts immediately took fire, and they, at once, lost the most precious gift of heaven—HOPE. These unhappy beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction. Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern aught in his, but aversion and despair. (545)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Beckford, William. [1786] 1844. Vathek. In Cyclopaedia of English Literature. Volume II, edited by Robert Chambers. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers.

  Vathek is usually classified as a Gothic novel, and it does contain some of the same elements as the archetypal Gothic novels: a defiant and charismatic villain, a darkly obsessive interest in pervers
e sexuality, and a diabolical bargain that leads the eponymous protagonist to damnation. It is, however, a highly idiosyncratic production, differing from the run-of-the-mill Gothics not merely in the exoticism of its Oriental setting but the grotesquerie of its manner. Its most obvious literary debt is to Antoine Galland’s Thousand-and-One Nights, but a more direct inspiration was probably the French Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire, whom Beckford met in Paris in 1777, who had adapted Oriental tales to his satirical philosophical purposes. Within that tradition, Vathek is an intriguing precursor to the Marquis de Sade’s elaborately extended contes philosophiques (philosophical fables), which proposed that morality is an arbitrary and hollow sham, and that there is nothing in Nature to deny the powerful the right to indulge themselves to the fullest in the perverse pleasure of perpetrating horrors. In the story, Caliph Vathek goes forth in search of a similar extreme.

  Whereas the legendary philosopher-magician Faust bargained with the devil for enlightenment, pleasure, and profit, Vathek feels that he has little to gain in such mundane directions. He wants to go beyond mere matters of pleasure and profit toward some final and absolute evil. The fate that claims him at the end is not the kind of petty damnation that was later to claim such Gothic villains as Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), but the revelation that the archfiend Eblis has no such absolute to offer. Vathek’s own hell is the realization that his boundless desires must remain forever unsatisfied, encapsulated in the limited hellfire that cages but never consumes the heart, leaving all the yearnings of the flesh intact while it mocks all ambition, emotion, and enlightenment. The only subsequent writer who came close to matching such imagery was Lord Byron in his own Faustian fantasy Manfred (1817).