Vampires Before 'Twilight': Hot And Dead

Hot And Dead: Vampires Before 'Twilight'

Vampire stories didn't begin with Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series, Anne Rice's bayou bloodsuckers or even Bram Stoker's "Dracula" in 1897. What one finds, in reading "Dracula's Guest: And Other Victorian Vampire Stories" (Walker & Co. 480 pages, $17), is that these creatures emerged from 18th century accounts of Eastern European peasant superstitions, then got a boost from the Romantic movement, which, as editor Michael Sims notes in his introduction to this 22-story anthology, "objected to evidence-based thinking as arid and godless, and worried that science was fumigating all the fun out of the world."

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot