Books I Read In September

Fiction

'Classic Tales of Vampires and Shapeshifters' ed. by Tig Thomas

This is a highly illustrated collection of short stories and novel extracts, primarily of vampire and werewolf stories. It features a range of 19th and 20th Century authors, with the oldest being Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) and the newest being E.F. Benson (1867-1940). Some of the stories are well known. There is the first part of 'Varney the Vampyre' (1847) by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest which began as a series of penny dreadful weekly episodes published 1845-47 before being novelised at 500,000 words. It established a lot of the 'lore' we tend to associate with vampires.

There are two extracts from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897) around the vampirisation of Lucy Westenra. there is also a short story, 'Dracula's Guest' which Stoker had intended to be the first chapter of the novel. Set in Munich it shows how Stoker originally envisaged Dracula coming from Styria, part of Austria, rather than Transylvania, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now in Romania. This short story has been recorded as a radio play by the BBC. Another well-known story is an abridged version of 'Carmilla' (1872) by (Joseph) Sheridan Le Fanu, which is set in Austria. To a modern reader the same-sex undertones are very clear and one can imagine at the time it was striking for that as for the vampirism portrayed.

The inclusion of these stories/extracts does highlight why they were successful. However, there are a lot of stories in this book which I certainly have never encountered but are of real interest. There are many of the Gothic tropes such as thunderstorms and dark castles that we associate with vampires and werewolves. However, Thomas has done well in selecting stories with different, perhaps unexpected elements. 'The Horror from the Mound' by Robert E. Howard, for example is set in West Texas; 'The Mark of the Beast', a werewolf story by Rudyard Kipling is set in northern India; 'The Cat of Nabéshima' is a Japanese story featuring a cat version of the kitsune fox and mujina badger shapeshifters and 'The Other Side: A Breton Legend' by Count Eric Stenbock, as the title suggests is set in Brittany and features an alien realm bordering ours where werewolves, wolfmen and even flame-eyed owls inhabit. The eponymous 'The Horla' seems to be a Brazilian homunculus creature with an ability to drain energy.

While Count Dracula and Sir France Varney are male vampires and werewolves, female ones probably outnumber them in the book. One that struck me was the 20th Century Mrs. Amsworth who features in E.J. Benson's eponymous story. She is a buxom, middle aged woman who plays piquet and uses the telephone but at night flies around an English village long plagued by vampires but is ultimately struck down by a motor car. Perhaps more classic are 'The Vampire Maid' from Westmorland who entraps a hiker and 'Clarimonde' who successfully seduces a French priest; she drains blood from the arm rather than neck; Carmilla takes it from the chest. The vampire of 'Aylmer Valance and the Vampire' by Alice and Claude Askew, is much less happy with her state. Aylmer Valance is a psychic detective, a early 20th Century precursor of the numerous ghost hunter television programmes of today and not a little influenced by Sherlock Holmes. There are a couple of more standard ghost stories, with E.J. Benson's 'The Room in the Tower' though effectively the ghost may be living dead and is found in a coffin full of blood (that features in a couple of stories and not a trait we tend to see now) and 'The Cold Embrace' by Mary E. Braddon.

The writing does at times strike the modern reader with the earnestness of 19th and early 20th Century authors. Some tropes seem over-used too. The endings of many of the stories, often the destruction of the vampire, is typically rushed; done in a paragraph. This may explain why some such as those written by Stoker, but also authors renowned in other genres, such as Kipling and Saki [Hector Hugh Munro] who writes quite an elegant werewolf story, with tiny glints of his usual humour as in the title of 'Gabriel-Ernest' stand out as delivering similar chills and curiosity but with greater deftness than some of the other authors. Overall I found this an interesting collection with unfamiliar stories, and themes and situations that you wonder why contemporary authors in vampire, werewolf and other supernatural stories do not revive for a fresh look at them.

'Fen' by Daisy Johnson

Though this is a short story collection, there is quite a lot of references in the stories to things that happen in others in the collection, so it is best to read them as a whole rather than, for example, dipping in and out. They are all roughly set in the same context: a very dreary part of rural East Anglia and the coastline a short journey away. Much of the focus is on young women, them having sex and becoming pregnant at a young age. Against these aspects many of the stories are magic realism. The best known sees an anorexic woman turn into an eel. However, there is a woman created of earth; a man raised from the dead whose words cause injuries; birds and foxes that can carry souls; three cannibal women house sharing. This is a modern Gothic and reminded me of novels set in the bleak parts of the southern USA where not only the landscape but the desultory aspects of the modern world add to the chill. It does not really go fully into horror, but certainly reminds you that some of the most cutting aspects of horror come from the sense of being trapped; unable to escape what is happening. I would not say I enjoyed this collection but I was impressed by it.

Non-Fiction

'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' by J.R. Hale

Having been allocated simply a 40-year slice of the series Fontana History of Europe, Hale made a wonderful decision not to slog through these years outlining the events chronologically. He does have some chronology, especially in Chapter II looking at the politics of Florence, France, Spain, England and Germany. However, for the most part, he studies the history thematically. He apologises for what he feels some readers might see as pretentious. However, in fact he delivers a really lively book that is an excellent source book for anyone interested in or writing about the era, especially how people of the time saw themselves and others.

There are practical aspects about how time was seen and how mobile the populations were; what people ate then moving on to social class, gender, religion, health and death. This book is a real antidote to lazy assumptions about people's behaviour which puts a blanket generalisation over many decades, even centuries. He is excellent on showing how in this crucial period attitudes were changing, importantly influenced by a connection to the Classical world and the wider dissemination of ideas through printing. He also has great sections on the importance of music and drama and how these impacted right across social levels, things often neglected for this era. This is a vibrant, enjoyable and informative book which I recommend for students of this period or simply readers who might be interested in seeing what was happening at this turning point in European (and he does cover from Portugal to Russia in his survey). I would also recommend this book to anyone about to embark on writing a non-fiction book, especially a historical one, to see a style which is both accurate but reaches out to readers whether they are specific or general.

What if 'Carmilla' Had Been More Successful than 'Dracula'?

I have previously discussed the modern vampire aesthetic and then when I was doing some research about 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley (1818) and reading about the other reasonable novel, 'The Vampyre' written by John William Polidori (1819) which came out of the contest in 1816 (the so-called Year Without Summer) for which Shelley wrote her novel, I was then reminded of 'Carmilla' by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). 'Carmilla' preceded Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897) and Stoker took a lot of elements from the earlier story. 'Carmilla' is set in Styria (in what is now southern Austria) and Stoker originally set 'Dracula' there before relocating the story to the borders of Transylvania and Moldavia (now in Romania; with a large Hungarian population). At the time both Styria and Transylvania were regions of the Austria-Hungary, a large multi-national country which in the 1890s covered modern day Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and some of southern Poland and much of western Romania (it gained Bosnia in 1908). 'Carmilla' features a Dr. Hesselius, whereas 'Dracula' has Dr. Van Helsing with both acting as the rational, analytical force in the face of the fantastical and supernatural. Other characters seem parallel to Le Fanu's.

The main difference is that the main vampire in 'Carmilla' is a female, a kind of embodied spirit of Countess Mircalla Karnstein and she is ultimately defeated by having her body dug up and destroyed. Carmilla can walk through walls and turn herself into a large cat-like creature, something like a panther. She drains blood from female victims, being clearly lesbian in orientation, but she does it by biting their chests rather than their necks.

Given that 'Dracula' has been so influential on all vampire fiction since it is interesting to speculate how different things would have been if 'Carmilla' had remained the dominant novel of the genre (there were numerous vampire novels throughout the 19th century so another may alternatively have come to the fore). The key thing is the sexuality. Lesbianism was a more challenging approach to simple male dominance over women. Aside from a loose adapatation of 'Carmilla' in the 1932 film 'Vampyr', this theme is one reason why movies drawing on the story were not common before the early 1960s and particularly in the early 1970s when there was a search for stories to fill Hammer Horror movies with titilating themes that could feature beautiful actresses. 'Blood and Roses' (1960) draws directly on 'Carmilla' and there were other such themed vampire movies like 'The Brides of Dracula' (1960) (three of these feature in the original 'Dracula' novel), 'The Vampire Lovers' (1970), 'Lust for a Vampire' (1971), 'Vampyros Lesbos' (1971), 'Vampyres' (1974). To some extent these reflect the fact that there has long been an assocation with vampire characters and sexuality, as someone once said 'Dracula is all about foreplay' because of his biting of the neck, taking control over a woman and so on. I have discussed the issue around the two fangs into the neck, and Carmilla's approach of biting the chest would have developed a very different aesthetic which references to suckling blood and a whole range of other rather alarming connotations. In contrast Dracula's seemingly very neat puncture marks in the neck are less challenging.

For me what is intriguing is if the dominant image of a vampire was female rather than male. It is interesting that Carmilla was not a femme fatale in the usually perceived way in that she sought to encapture men, so it would have created a differen stock character in other genres such as detective stories, which occasionally had the 'evil lesbian' but much less so than one who sought to exploit men, and even then usually through beauty rather than power. The other differences would have been the association with big cats rather than bats or dogs which Dracula is associated with. To some extent the cat appearance relates back to traditional stories of witches' familiars and then forwards to 'Catwoman' styles of the 20th century, notably in 'Batman' (from 1939). The other thing is the location. Even today Transylvania is seen as distant, somewhat and backward part of Europe with ethnic problems between the Hungarian population there living in Romania. In contrast, whilst Styria is mountainous it lies much closer to the heart of Europe and to cities in Austria, southern Germany and northern Italy. Even in the late 19th century it was less remote and so what we may have seen earlier was the more urban sophisticated vampire that has really only come to the fore from the 1980s.

If Stoker had felt his novel to be too derivative (and one must not dismiss in fact there are real elements of innovation that he brought to the genre, I do not want to do the book down entirely) of 'Carmilla' or he had never finished it. It would be interesting to have seen if the vampire novel and the following films would have still found a way to move in the direction of the way he portrayed it, i.e. male and in Transylvania, as those things fitted with what society was willing to tolerate rather than female in Styria. To some degree it is probably about market. On average 90% of the population is heterosexual and whilst many heterosexual men enjoy stylised lesbian sexual activity, an author writing a lesbian story is appealing to a much smaller market and one that has only really become open since the feminist era of the 1970s. The issue more broadly is, though, that the dominance of 'Dracula' has possibly closed off other explorations of the vampire aesthetic (despite Anne Rice) which look at it from a female perspective for more than titilating reasons. Though it is noted that 'Carmilla' was written by a man for men, as the Japanese magazine 'Carmilla' has done it is possible to recapture the usage for women. At the time the fact that the baddie is a woman as strong as the men she fights was unusual, so despite the possible intentions of the author it can be seen as including feminist elements that do not seem to have been developed by authors since.

You can access:-
'Carmilla' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10007
An article on how 'Dracula' masculinised vampire stories after 'Carmilla' here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n4_v38/ai_18981386
'Dracula' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/345
'The Vampyre' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6087