The Vampire | Litsy

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

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This was a fun (if that's the right word for tales of murder and the undead) collection of stories. Published in the early '70s it's naturally a set of older stories, some well-known classics, with a few more obscure, but interesting, tales. Of those I hadn't read before, Gogol's "Viy" ended well, even if it took a while to get going; Tubb's post-apocalypse story, "Fresh Guy" is a darkly humorous satire, while Capuana's 1907 story, "A Vampire", ⬇️

Bookwomble ... read as a fairly modern story of science colliding with the supernatural. A solid 4⭐s 2y

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Bookwomble

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

"Is it not conceivable that one of the notes of my cerebral keyboard is out of action?"

A question I have sometimes asked myself ?????
Guy de Maupassant asked himself first in "The Horla" ?

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Bookwomble

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

"I have come a very long way, from a place from which no-one has ever yet returned; there is neither sun nor moon in the country I come from; nothing but space and shadow; neither road nor pathway; no earth for the foot, no air for the wings; and yet I am here, for love is stronger than death and will conquer it in the end."

- The Beautiful Vampire by Théophile Gautier

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Bookwomble

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

I read Le Fanu's "Carmilla" a year or so ago, and rereading it in this anthology it stands up really well as a Gothic classic. The editors have done a great job in sequencing the first three stories, starting with Dom Calmet's study of vampire lore, which fixed aspects of the literary vampire, then the passage from Durrell's Alexandria Quartet with its delirious Carnival masquerade, then Carmilla, standing between the other two chronologically, ?

Bookwomble ... while synthesising both in this running order.
The image is Alexandra Bastedo as Carmilla in the film, "The Blood-Spattered Bride", which I haven't seen, but would like to. 2y

vivastory I have an edition of Carmilla (TBR) annotated by Carmen Maria Machado. I don't know if you have access to Criterion Channel streaming but they have a collection of vampire movies this month. 2y

Bookwomble @vivastory Oh, an annotated edition sounds interesting 🙂 I don't have the Criterion Channel, but I might watch my own small collection of vampire movies over the next few weeks. 2y

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Bookwomble

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

"It is indeed hard to believe that the vampires could move in & out of their graves without disturbing the earth...to say that the Devil dematerialises the vampires' bodies is irrational & unwarranted...The belief of the ancient Greeks in the return of departed spirits was no more rational than the belief in ghosts & vampires. Ignorance, prejudice & fear nourished this foolish fantasy & nourish it still...The reports of the dead chewing in their?

Bookwomble ... graves are so pitifully puerile that they do not deserve serious consideration."
Augustin Calmet's 1751 treatise on the vampires of Eastern Europe collected such seemingly reputable accounts of vampirism as were then current & concludes that it's all nonsense & more easily explained by applying commonsense & reason. That his account has continually been used to support such superstitions would, I assume, have him turning in his own grave? 2y

Graywacke That quote is entertaining! Perhaps we should put more thought into dematerialized vampires. 2y

Bookwomble @Graywacke I like that a clergyman of the 18th century put considerable thought into it during an age of faith and belief, and was unconvinced 🙂 2y

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Graywacke @Bookwomble to come up such a lovely concept and then merely to banish it as irrational and unwarranted is arguably neglectful. 🙂 2y

Bookwomble @Graywacke During his showman years Houdini called himself The Ectoplasmic Man, saying his ability to escape the apparently inescapable was due to a supernatural ability to dematerialise & pass through any barrier, which was lapped up by the Spiritualist movement. When he became a debunker of Spiritualist charlatanry & admitted he used skillful trickery, affronted spiritualists insisted that he did dematerialise, he just wasn't aware of his power! 2y

Bookwomble @Graywacke All of which is to say that a healthy degree of wilful suspension of disbelief is wonderfully entertaining, but I'd prefer it but to result in villagers with torches and pitchforks decapitating old women 🙂 2y

Bookwomble @Graywacke And, sorry for my humourless, pedagogical reply. I do realise you were having fun with the idea 😊 2y

Graywacke @Bookwomble goodness, that was humorless. I‘m thoroughly entertained! And while I‘m certainly ok without the suspension of belief (and without the decapitated old women), I‘m still charmed by Houdini dematerializing without even realizing it. And Calmet might have been very entertaining to have over for dinner. 2y

Bookwomble @Graywacke Ah, well thank you, Dan 😊 It might have been interesting to have Calmet and Montague Summers over together: both clerics, both interested in vampirism, though Summers certainly less religiously orthodox than Calmet. 2y

vivastory This quote reminds me of some of the back & forth going on between certain religious figures of authority in

The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters

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Bookwomble

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

Although Roger Vadim grabs the cover credit, he wrote only the foreword, and the actual editors are Ornella Volta, Valeria Riva and, for this English edition of the Italian original, Margaret Crosland.
The first Pan edition of 1965 had a crusty-looking mummified vampire impaled on the cover. By 1972, my edition had a Hammer Horror influenced "Bloofer Lady" on the front ??‍♀️
Contains some old favourites including Carmilla, Mrs. Amworth and ?

Bookwomble ... The Horla, as well as several new to me. Only had this book tbr for about 25 years! Is that a kind of undeath for a book?
Ornella Volta seems to have been an interesting person, having written a few histories of vampire folklore, as well as being an eminent authority on French composer Erik Satie, and I note that it's her biography of Satie that I have on my wish list.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/01/ornella-volta-obituary 2y

LeahBergen What a cover! 👍 2y

Bookwomble @LeahBergen Classy Trashy ? It reminds me of the Bauhaus song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", perhaps with a slight change of spelling - ?Red velvet lines the black box / Bella Lugosi's dead? 2y

LeahBergen Yes! 😆 2y

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Bookwomble

The Vampire: An Anthology | Margaret Crosland

'On a December day in 1959, I was sitting with a few friends in a trattoria in Rome."

From the foreword by film director, Roger Vadim. Some other quotes from his foreword:

"Sometimes a strange, complex, undefined universe projects into the fringe of our lives. Some of us, without knowing why, discern it or sense its existence for a brief moment."

"I do not believe in vampire stories, but I believe in what inspired them." ?‍♂️?

Bookwomble #FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl 2y

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