Category: Daily Dispatch

I’ve been interested in vintage horror and “weird fiction” for nearly half a century, so I thought I knew a thing or two about vampires. Over and over again, I’ve encountered historical surveys or introductions that repeat that the first vampire story in English was a fragment by Lord Byron. This was undertaken to fulfill his part in a wager he proposed, while lounging with his bored Bohemian cohort on Lake Geneva, during the soggy summer of 1816, a contest to concoct the scariest ghost story that also yielded Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Byron’s fragment was picked up and completed by his physician (also part of the party), John Polidori, who gave us the transparently Byronic Lord Ruthven in “The Vampyre” (1819) – at first believed to have been written by Byron himself.

Then there’s a long gap until the penny dreadful “Varney the Vampire” (published weekly, in serialized form, from 1845-1847); and after that, another quarter century until Sheridan LeFanu’s proto-lesbian vampire novella “Carmilla” (1872); and at the far end of the century, the ne plus ultra of vampire novels, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897).

As you can see, I had it down. Or so I thought.

Now here I am, hanging onto middle age by my fingernails, only to discover this rich vein of vampire fiction in France. I suppose I failed to take into account that the surveys I was reading were concerned with vampire tales IN ENGLISH. But has it not traditionally been the case, everything being so Anglocentric here in the U.S.? In fact, the books I’m about to consider didn’t even exist in translation until fairly recently.

Imagine my surprise and delight to stumble across Paul Féval. Féval was known for his swashbuckling feuilletons (serialized adventure stories), most notably “Les Mystères de Londres” (itself cashing in on Eugène Sue’s “Les Mystères de Paris”), said to be a precursor of “The Count of Monte Cristo.” More to the point, he wrote three vampire novels, published after the same fashion, “Le Chevalier Ténèbre” (1860), “La Vampire” (1865), and “La Ville Vampire” (1874).

I’m going right to the top and starting with the third of his vampire feuilletons, “La Ville Vampire,” or “Vampire City.” From what I understand, this is the one in which the real-life Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe faces off against the undead as a kind of proto-Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Alas, Féval came to a bad end. First, he lost his incredible fortune – millions of dollars by today’s reckoning – in a financial scandal involving the Ottoman Empire. He staggered out of the ashes, hoping to reinvent himself by turning over a new leaf. He became the equivalent of a born-again Christian, gave up writing lurid novels, which he now regarded as sinful, and devoted himself to going back and touching up his earlier works in an attempt to smooth over all the objectionable bits. He also began writing novels on Christian themes.

When he was ruined a second time, by an embezzler, he suffered an attack of apoplexy that left him physically and creatively paralyzed. Two years later his wife died, which led to a second attack. He died in 1887 at the age of 70.

Another notable French contributor to the vampire genre was Pierre Alexis, Viscount of Ponson du Terrail (also, by the way, influenced by Radcliffe and Sue). Ponson du Terrail is said to be an important transitional figure in the evolution from old-fashioned Gothic novel to what we now recognize as the modern adventure story – especially in his “Rocambole” series, beginning with “L’Héritage Mystérieux, which features an heroic figure who rises above his apprenticeship to an evil genius to become a fearless champion of good.

The author certainly put his money where his mouth was. Following the surrender of Napoleon III to the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War, Ponson fled Paris to his estate near Orléans to engage in guerilla warfare against the enemy. In the end, he was forced to flee to Bordeaux after the Germans burned down his castle. He died in Bordeaux at 42, leaving his Rocambole saga incomplete.

I owe Brian Stableford and Black Coat Press a bottomless debt of thanks for exhuming a veritable catacomb of French vampire fiction. While I can’t yet vouch for Stableford’s talents as a translator, I am in awe of his drive and tenacity. When he realized so many of these novels were unavailable in English, he undertook to translate all of them himself. He published more than a hundred translations, on top of his hundred or so original novels and countless short stories. For the Black Coat publications, he also provides what promises to be, in light of the novels’ obscurity in the English-speaking world, a lot of helpful information in his introductions and afterwords.

In addition, I notice Stableford has translated and adapted (?) another, earlier Franco-vampire novel, “The Vampire Lord Ruthwen” (1820), spinning off from Polidori, also available from Black Coat Press. I’ll certainly keep it in mind, but I think I’m good with French vampire novels for this year.

https://www.blackcoatpress.com/catalog.html

In the process of boning up on French vampire fiction, I also learned of “La Morte Amoureuse” (1836) by Théophile Gautier, whose racy gender-bending swashbuckler, “Mademoiselle Maupin,” I happened to read in the past 15 years or so. So I picked up this collection, “The Mummy’s Foot and Other Fantastic Tales” – which looks like it’s basically a repackaging of “One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances” (1882), with one or two substitutions of some of Gautier’s other weird fiction, translated by Lafcadio Hearn – now retitled, no doubt to appeal to a more luridly-inclined generation.

For classical music folk, Gautier cowrote the libretto for Adolphe Adam’s ballet “Giselle” and also rubbed shoulders with composers Georges Bizet, Giuseppe Verdi, and Hector Berlioz. Also, Charles Baudelaire dedicated his seminal volume of decadent poetry, “Les Fleurs de mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”) to him.

“The Mummy’s Foot” contains Gautier’s vampire story under its alternate title (after the vamp herself), “Clarimonde.” I just read it last night, and for anyone hankering for a 19th century vampire story on a level with “Carmilla,” it’s totally worth it. Is it a dream? An allegory? A manifestation of the narrator’s psychological state? Or did Clarimonde really exist and the story actually unfold as related? All I can say definitively is that it is one bizarre fever dream.

The book, a trade paperback edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Hippocampus Press, is very well produced, with a glossy cover, good paper, and a solid binding, none of which should be taken for granted in these days when so many independent “publishers” knock off inferior, on-demand reprints of public domain material in their basements. If you’re interested in this sort of fiction, definitely check out the titles in Hippocampus’ “Classics of Gothic Horror Collection.”

https://www.hippocampuspress.com/classics-of-gothic-horror

Of course the mummy story takes the cover, on the assumption that readers still know what mummies are and still associate them with supernatural goings-on. This prompted me to recollect Guy Boothby’s mummy potboiler “Pharos, the Egyptian” (1898), which is said to be closest in spirit to the Boris Karloff movie. It also features an over-the-top supervillain whose exotic cruelty and inexorable evil are said to have played on British imperial anxiety, in much the same way as “Dracula” and H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” (also 1898) did. There’s no way this fez-wearing stereotype is not going to be offensive to some modern readers, but you know I am going to lap it up, because I’m a grown-up, and I know right from wrong, and I understand historical context, and I know it’s just fantasy. I can’t wait to give it a whirl.

My copy was issued by Dover Publications, which has been making novels of this sort available more consistently than anyone else for more than 60 years, thanks to the editorial guidance of E.F. Bleiler. How I wish I could shake that man’s hand. (Bleiler died in 2010.) The company went bankrupt in 2020, but was purchased by Atlas Holdings, and the catalog remains available.

https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486803159?_pos=1&_sid=e34be0538&_ss=r

Who knows how many of these volumes of forgotten lore I’ll be able to wade through this month? Probably not many. There’s certainly plenty here to keep me entertained through November, and likely over the winter months, if not to be resurrected next year.

How about you? Reading anything to raise a shiver? As the days grow short, October, November, and December are prime ghost story season (if we’re to follow Dickens and M.R. James to Christmas). Hell, I’ll even throw January into the bargain. Why not?

Happy reading, everyone, and happy Halloween!