Vampires (21 page)

The story became an immediate sensation, partly because Byron was believed to have written it, but also because it met the public’s growing enthusiasm for gothic horror stories. Moreover, it was highly original, since it transformed the ugly, brutish vampire of Slavic folklore into the suave, charismatic, upper-class villain that we are so familiar with today.

As mentioned earlier, the idea of the revenant, a spirit returning from the dead to visit a family member or lover, is a very ancient one that crosses many cultures, and was a strong theme in much European folklore. In the nineteenth century, this theme found its way into English literature, not just in poems, but in stories as well. The first of these stories was written by a woman, Elizabeth Grey, whose ghostly tale
The Skeleton Count
, or
The Vampire Mistress
was published in 1828 in the weekly paper
The Casket
. Grey was a well-known and very prolific popular novelist of the period. Most of her work remains obscure today, but this story was to assure her a place in literary history.

Many of Grey’s stories appeared in the so-called ‘penny dreadfuls’, serial stories that appeared in cheap editions over a period of weeks. Each of the editions cost a penny, and was printed on pulp paper, usually with a lurid illustration on the front to match the contents. The ‘penny dreadfuls’ were bought, much as comics used to be, mainly by children, teenagers and young adults. One of the most popular of all these series was a story called
Varney the Vampire
, or
The Feast of Blood
by James Malcolm Rymer. (Some attribute the series to another gothic horror writer, Thomas Preskett Prest, creator of another famous character in the horror genre, Sweeney Todd.) So popular was Varney that in 1847, the series was published in book form, in a mammoth edition running to over 800 pages, with 220 chapters, and illustrated by an unknown artist who nevertheless vividly captured the horrific exploits of this gruesome hero.

The series featured a vampire, Sir Francis Varney, and his attacks on a family called the Bannerworths. Varney’s motivation for troubling the Bannerworths was never entirely clear; nor was the cause of his death, or the circumstances of his revival, allowing the author to engage in various speculative tales about how his corpse was reanimated. As the stories progress, we find out that Varney has been cursed with vampirism after betraying a royalist to Oliver Cromwell and accidentally killing his son in a fit of rage, and over the course of the series, Varney becomes a more and more sympathetic character: at the end, desperately unhappy about his condition, he finally throws himself into a volcano, and disappears into the fiery depths for ever.

Varney introduced several important features to vampire stories, and some of these have become staples of horror fiction up to the present day. He has supernatural powers, is able to hypnotize people, and has prominent fangs, which, when he feeds off a victim’s blood, leave two puncture marks on the skin. He does not fear garlic or crosses, can withstand daylight, and is able to act as an ordinary human being – for example, he can eat normal food and drink, although it does not give him sustenance. It is only when he is hungry that he exhibits the characteristics of a vampire. Most significant of all, we are able to feel sympathy for him as an individual suffering from a horrible condition; through the story of the mythical vampire, we come to empathize with the feelings of an outsider, forever doomed as an outcast from human society because of a past sin, or because of his nature, or both. In this sense, Varney is a precursor of the contemporary ‘sympathetic’ vampire, which today excites so much interest in romantic horror fiction.

The next milestone in the history of vampire fiction was a gothic novella entitled
Carmilla
, which was published in 1872 in the magazine
The Dark Blue
. The author was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a famous writer of ghost stories, who came from a well-known literary family that included a number of playwrights and novelists. Two illustrators were employed to work on his book, resulting in some confusion as to the appearance of certain characters, but in essence, the story concerns an innocent young woman, Laura, and her close friend, Carmilla, who turns out to be a vampire.

In true gothic style, the story begins with a remote castle in a forest in Austria, where a young woman, Laura, and her widowed father live in solitary splendour. Laura tells of a dream she had as a young girl in which a beautiful stranger came to her room and bit her on the chest. As a teenager, she longs for a companion, and is disappointed when her father receives a message to say that the young lady he has sent for, Bertha Rheinfeldt, has died suddenly. However, by chance, a carriage accident takes place outside the castle, and a young woman, Carmilla, emerges from it, injured. Laura and Carmilla immediately recognize each other from the dream they had as children. Meanwhile, Carmilla’s mother explains to Laura’s father that she must journey on, and it is decided that Carmilla will be left at the castle.

In the weeks that follow, Carmilla and Laura become close friends, but Carmilla refuses to divulge anything about her family or former life. Carmilla also has other peculiarities. Her moods change abruptly, from extreme sweetness to intense anger; she sleeps a great deal during the day, and is often found sleepwalking at night. In addition, she hates the sound of Christian hymns. Most disturbingly, she begins to show a romantic attachment to Laura, which Laura finds repugnant:

‘Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you
shall
be mine, and you and I are one for ever.”’

As a result of this unwanted attention, Laura begins to become anxious, and experiences severe nightmares in which she dreams of a cat-like animal that attacks her, biting her chest, and then turns into a beautiful young woman.

We then find out what happened to the unfortunate Bertha. According to her guardian, Bertha was attacked by a young lady called Millarca, who came to the house in exactly the same circumstances as Carmilla. The guardian recounts how, on realizing Millarca was a vampire, he lay in wait for her, and saw her enter the room as a cat-like creature. The creature bit Bertha on the neck and then left, taking her human form once more. Shortly afterwards, Bertha died.

It then transpires that Millarca and Carmilla are one and the same, both incarnations of a famous vampire, Countess Karnstein, who died years ago. (There is some indication of this earlier in the novel, when a portrait of Countess Karnstein is seen, and it is pointed out that it exactly resembles Carmilla, down to a tiny mole on her neck.) Laura’s father vows to find and kill Carmilla, and after a dramatic showdown with the cornered vampire in a ruined chapel, a vampire specialist, Baron Vordenburg, is sent for. He manages to find the Countess’s tomb, exhumes the body, and performs the appropriate vampire-slaying rituals. Carmilla is destroyed for ever, and young Laura is saved from the vampire’s deathly embrace.