Vampires, novels and short histories

Abraham "Bram" Stoker (1847 -1912) was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. George Sylvester Viereck (1884 -1962) was a German-American poet and writer. The House of the Vampire...is one of the first psychic vampire stories where a vampire feeds off more than just blood. Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 -1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was a leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 26 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871-72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The story is often anthologized and has been adapted many times in film and other media. John William Polidori (1795 -1821) was an English writer and physician. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction and the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre. Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (1811 -1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. "La Morte amoureuse" (in English: "The Dead in Love or Carmille") is a short story written by Théophile Gautier and published in La Chronique de Paris in 1836. It tells the story of a priest named Romuald who falls in love with Clarimonde, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire. In this book: Dracula Bram Stoker The House of the Vampire George Sylvester Viereck The Vampyre John William Polidori Carmilla Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu The Dead in Love or Clarimonde Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier Translator: Lafcadio Hearn