Rivals of Dracula Read online

  THE RIVALS OF DRACULA

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula, still the most famous of all vampire stories, was first published in 1897. But the bloodsucking Count was not the only member of the undead to bare his fangs in the literature of the period. Late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is full of vampires and this anthology of scary stories introduces modern readers to fifteen of them. A travel writer in Sweden unleashes something awful from an ancient mausoleum. A psychic detective battles a vampire that has taken refuge in an Egyptian mummy. A nightmare becomes reality in the tower room of a gloomy country house. Including works by both well-known writers of the supernatural such as MR James and EF Benson and less familiar authors like the Australian Hume Nisbet and the American F Marion Crawford, The Rivals of Dracula is a collection of classic tales to chill the blood and tingle the spine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller. He has published books on a wide variety of subjects from Sherlock Holmes to London’s blue plaques. He is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Times and for BBC History magazine. His titles for Pocket Essentials include Sigmund Freud, Peter Mark Roget: The Man Who Became a Book, Robin Hood: Myth, History & Culture and A Short History of Polar Exploration. He lives near Manchester.

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, I would like to thank Ion Mills, Claire Watts, Frances Teehan, Clare Quinlivan and everybody at Oldcastle Books for their hard work and help as I was compiling this anthology. Thanks too to Elsa Mathern for the excellent cover design and to Jayne Lewis and Irene Goodacre for the copy-editing and proof-reading skills which enabled them to pick up many mistakes which would have otherwise gone uncorrected. However, my greatest thanks, as always, go to my wife Eve who is an ever-present source of love and encouragement.

  Introduction

  In 1897, the Irish author Bram Stoker published a novel which has become the most famous of all vampire stories. The novel was, of course, Dracula. It is almost needless to note that Stoker did not invent the figure of the vampire. Indeed, belief in creatures which return from the grave to prey upon their living victims or which suck the blood and the life from human beings seems to have existed for millennia. The Edimmu in Sumerian mythology, the Strix in Ancient Greece and Rome, the Vetala in Hindu mythology all have attributes that link them to the vampire. Fast forward to Europe in the Middle Ages and there are plenty of stories of vampire-like creatures from England to Hungary. They continued to be recorded for several centuries and, even in the supposedly enlightened eighteenth century, reports of real-life vampires flooded out of Eastern Europe. The idea of vampirism seems to have been particularly strong in Slavic folklore and it was in Transylvania that Stoker chose to place the homeland of his own vampire.

  The name ‘Dracula’ he took from a historical figure, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, born in 1431. Vlad’s father had been given the honorary name of ‘Dracul’ (the Wallachian word for ‘dragon’) and Vlad was described as ‘Dracula’ or ‘son of the dragon’. Schooled in the brutal politics of Eastern Europe in the mediaeval era, Vlad Dracula was renowned for the bloodthirsty punishments he inflicted on his enemies. During several spells as ruler, which finally ended with his death in battle in 1476, he gained the nickname Vlad the Impaler because of his fondness for impaling those who opposed him on wooden stakes and leaving their bodies to terrorise any others who might think of taking up arms against him. One chronicler reports seeing twenty thousand men, women and children who had suffered this punishment. After his death, Vlad Dracula rapidly became a byword for cruelty and books describing his misdeeds with alluring titles like The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula were published in the Balkans and further afield. Some scholars claim that Vlad Dracula has been unjustly stigmatised. His cruelties were no worse than those of many other mediaeval rulers whose reputations have not suffered as his has done. In Romania he is seen as a significant figure in the nation’s history who built a strong and independent state of Wallachia and defended it against the Turks. In the rest of the world he is fated to be remembered because, one day in the 1890s, Bram Stoker read of him in a history of Eastern Europe and decided to borrow his name for the vampiric anti-hero of a novel he was writing.

  Stoker did not invent the vampire and nor was he the first writer to make use of the creature in his work. The literary vampire first makes an appearance in eighteenth-century poetry, originally in Germany and, towards the end of the century, in England. An obscure German poet, Heinrich August Ossenfelder, published ‘Der Vampir’ in 1748, a short poem which reflected interest at the time in a series of reports from Eastern Europe and the Balkans of vampire activity in the Austrian Empire. Ossenfelder seems to have introduced the vampire into European literature and other German poets, most notably Goethe in ‘The Bride of Corinth’, followed his example. In England, a vampire is a peripheral character in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer and Coleridge’s unfinished Christabel can be interpreted as a vampire romance.

  Romantic poets also had a role to play in the appearance of the vampire in prose fiction. In the summer of 1816, Byron and Shelley, together with Shelley’s soon-to-be wife Mary, were staying at the Villa Diodati in the Swiss village of Cologny. Conversation turned frequently to the supernatural and all three began to write stories on the subject. The only one that was finished was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, Byron did produce a fragment of a novel, which found its way into print (against the poet’s wishes) in 1819. What was published does suggest that Byron intended to write a vampire story and his personal physician John Polidori, who was also present at the Villa Diodati, took inspiration from what little had been written. Polidori created his own supernatural tale which was published as The Vampyre in the same year. Confusingly, it first appeared under Byron’s name, presumably in order to increase its commercial appeal, but Polidori soon laid claim to it and his authorship was acknowledged in later editions.

  Polidori followed romantic tradition by dying young in 1821 at the age of only twenty-five but his book lived on. In the words of Christopher Frayling, in an introduction to a 1990s anthology of vampire literature, his novella is ‘the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre’. It was popular enough to be plagiarised in copycat stories, adapted into plays and even set to music. Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr of 1828 took one of the dramas cobbled together from Polidori’s work and transformed it into an opera which is still occasionally performed today. Over the next decade and a half there were one or two noteworthy examples of vampire literature (the 1841 Russian novella Oupyr by Alexei Tolstoy, a distant cousin of the more famous Leo, is an interesting curiosity) but the most significant development came in the mid-1840s.

  At the time, a new audience for cheap, sensationalist reading matter was developing and the so-called ‘penny dreadful’ had emerged to cater for it. One of the most successful of the penny dreadful serials, first published between 1845 and 1847 and eventually running to more than half a million words, was Varney the Vampire. Most probably written by a prolific hack author named James Malcolm Rymer (who may also have had a hand in the first story to feature the demon barber Sweeney Todd) this was what a recent writer has described as ‘a rambling gore-fest’ in which the vampire Sir Francis Varney regularly indulges his lust for human blood. Actually sub-titled ‘The Feast of Blood’, Varney’s bloodsucking adventures were immensely popular with their target readership (broadly speaking, the newly literate urban working class) and introduced a number of standard ideas about fictional vampires that have survived to the present day. Varney was, for example, one of the first vampires to come equipped with fangs, th
e better to get at his favourite sustenance. In pursuit of one victim, he ‘seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth – a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows’.

  Across Europe in the decades to follow, writers produced vampire novels. Some were as lurid as the tales of Varney; others were more subtle and sophisticated. The French novelist Paul Féval, a rival of Dumas in historical fiction, wrote a trilogy (Le Chevalier Ténèbre, La Vampire and La Ville Vampire) which has been translated into English by the science fiction and horror writer Brian Stableford; in Germany the prolific travel writer and novelist Hans Wachenhusen published Der Vampyr in 1878 which is set in Bulgaria under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and features a former Orthodox priest as its villain.

  In English, the best-known vampire fiction by far of this period is Carmilla, a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu which was serialised in a magazine in 1871 and published in a collection of short works entitled In a Glass Darkly the following year. Born into a Huguenot family long resident in Dublin and related on his mother’s side to the playwright Sheridan, Le Fanu trained as a lawyer but soon turned to journalism and fiction. He published more than a dozen novels, including Uncle Silas and The House by the Church Yard, and became renowned for his ghost stories. Carmilla, with its tale of the unsettling relationship between the narrator Laura and the enigmatic title character, was not the first work of vampire fiction in which the main vampiric protagonist is female but it has become the most influential. On screen, it has provided the inspiration for a wide variety of works from Hammer horror films to YouTube web series. And in the two decades immediately after its publication it influenced other writers, including most notably Le Fanu’s fellow Irishman Bram Stoker. Names in the later novel echo the earlier book (Rheinfeldt in Carmilla, Renfield in Dracula); the lonely castle in Styria which is the setting for Le Fanu’s story is pushed even further east and made even more remote when it is reimagined as Dracula’s castle in Stoker’s novel; the descriptions of the vampiric women in the two tales (Carmilla in the earlier work, Lucy Westenra in the later) are similar. Ideas about repressed sexual desire, implicit in Dracula, are, bearing in mind the constraints of the Victorian era, closer to the surface in Le Fanu’s book. And, even more shockingly, the desires are lesbian.

  Dracula very clearly drew on Le Fanu’s earlier book but it contains the vampire who would soon overshadow all other literary vampires. Who exactly was its creator? Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 and originally worked as a civil servant in the city. His first published book was the less than exciting volume, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. In 1876, Stoker, a great theatre-lover, met the legendary Victorian actor Henry Irving and, two years later, he gave up his civil service career to become Irving’s manager at the Lyceum Theatre in London. In London, he began to publish short stories and novels, often with a supernatural theme. His most famous novel did win praise on its first publication in May 1897. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to Stoker to say how much he had enjoyed the book calling it ‘the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years’. The Daily Mail reviewer thought it a better book than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yet other reviewers at the time were dismissive. ‘It reads at times,’ one wrote, ‘like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events.’ The book was not a bestseller and, thanks to mistakes in registering its copyright, Stoker made little money from it. He continued to publish further fiction including The Jewel of Seven Stars, a story of mummies, reincarnation and ancient Egyptian curses, and The Lair of the White Worm, a tale of ancient evil that was fated to be modernised and made into a fantastically bad but curiously enjoyable film by Ken Russell in the 1980s. When Stoker died in London on 20 April 1912 he was not a rich man and Dracula had not yet become the archetypal figure of sinister power and allure which we know today. It was the twentieth-century adaptations, revisions, sequels and re-tellings of his story, most notably those on film, which were to turn the Count into legend.

  So famous has Dracula become that it is all too easy to believe that he was the only fictional vampire of his day. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was something about the figure of the vampire that appealed to the imaginations of late Victorian and Edwardian readers as much as it does, in different ways, to so many people today. This anthology attempts to reflect the diversity of vampire stories that flourished in the two decades before and the two decades after the publication of Stoker’s iconic tale. The authors range from writers like EF Benson and MR James who are rightly renowned for the literary qualities of their supernatural fiction to those like the Askews, husband and wife, and the Prichards (aka the Herons), mother and son, who have been more or less forgotten. The Askews and the Prichards, like other writers such as Richard Marsh whose work features in the anthology, made their livings by producing stories for the vast number of weekly and monthly magazines that proliferated in the period. They were not literary stylists and they were often obliged to pour out fiction at such a rate that quantity became as important as quality but they aimed always to write exciting and readable narratives and they mostly succeeded. What can be termed ‘weird’ fiction was a very important part of the entertainment served up by the story magazines and the vampires took their places alongside the ghosts, ghouls and supernatural creatures of all kinds which populated their pages.

  These vampires reflect a variety of turn-of-the-century anxieties and interests. Readers will notice just how many of them are voracious women who prey on initially unsuspecting men. Whether traditional vampires like Hume Nisbet’s vampire maid or homicidal maniacs like Mary Brooker in Richard Marsh’s ‘The Mask’ or psychic vampires like Mrs Tierce in Phil Robinson’s ‘Medusa’, the female of the species is often deadlier than the male. It’s not too much of an imaginative leap to link this preponderance of she-vampires with the rise of the ‘New Woman’, the self-assertive feminist of the 1880s and 1890s, and the concerns about sexuality and the relationship between the sexes that she aroused. The classic vampire story is wary of the foreign as well as the feminine. In Carmilla, the title character who threatens the English heroine Laura comes from the backwaters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; in Dracula, emphasis is laid upon the distance from the safety of home that Jonathan Harker has travelled to reach the Count’s castle and the Count’s arrival at Whitby marks a terrible intrusion of violent otherness into the ordered society of late Victorian England.

  Perhaps more than anything, however, the stories selected in The Rivals of Dracula show an awareness of the power of history. In tale after tale of the fifteen in the book, the past is not past. Like the undead Dracula it returns to trouble people in the present. Both the narrator of HB Marriott Watson’s ‘The Stone Chamber’ and his friend Warrington are frighteningly influenced by the violent events that took place nearly two centuries earlier in the room of its title. In Mary Cholmondeley’s ‘Let Loose’, the remote Yorkshire village of Wet Waste-on-the-Wolds seems trapped in the past and the evil spirit of an extinct family is accidentally released to prey once more on the villagers. MR James’s stories are permeated by his ambivalent fascination with history and ‘Count Magnus’ shows the dangers of prying too insistently into its nooks and corners.

  The stories I have included in The Rivals of Dracula reveal a wide variety of vampires at work. There is an undead Icelander who fights with one of the heroes of the sagas (‘Grettir at Thorhall-stead’); there is a vampiric spirit which takes over the physical form of an ancient mummy (‘Aylmer Vance and the Vampire’); there is a murdered Italian girl who returns to feed upon the blood of the man she once loved (‘For the Blood is the Life’); there is even a tree which sucks the life from those who rest in its branches (‘The Sumach’). These rivals are, more often than not, very different from the bloodsucking Count of Stoker’s novel and very different one from another. The stories in which they appear all, however, remain well worth reading.

  Aylmer Vance and the Vampire

  Alic
e Askew (1874–1917) and Claude Askew (1865–1917)

  The son of a clergyman, Claude Askew was at school at Eton and then travelled on the Continent as a young man. He married Alice Leake, the daughter of an army colonel, in 1900 and they were soon earning their living with their pens. Their first successes were with newspaper serials but they rapidly moved on to hardcover fiction. The Askews were astonishingly prolific and published nearly ninety books in a dozen years (nine novels appeared under their names in 1913 alone) but almost all of them have been forgotten and are long out of print. Their one venture into the realm of the supernatural consisted of eight stories which appeared in an obscure magazine named The Weekly Tale-Teller in 1914. These featured an intrepid psychic detective named Aylmer Vance and his Watson-like sidekick Dexter. Vance and Dexter face an assortment of supernatural beings in their adventures, including, in the one printed below, a vampire. During the First World War, both Askews travelled to Serbia to work with a field hospital attached to the Serbian army and to write about the country which was one of Britain’s allies in the war. In 1917, they both died when the Italian steamer on which they were making their way to Corfu to join Serbian soldiers in exile was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank.

  Aylmer Vance had rooms in Dover Street, Piccadilly, and now that I had decided to follow in his footsteps and to accept him as my instructor in matters psychic, I found it convenient to lodge in the same house. Aylmer and I quickly became close friends, and he showed me how to develop that faculty of clairvoyance which I had possessed without being aware of it. And I may say at once that this particular faculty of mine proved of service on several important occasions.

  At the same time I made myself useful to Vance in other ways, not the least of which was that of acting as recorder of his many strange adventures. For himself, he never cared much about publicity, and it was some time before I could persuade him, in the interests of science, to allow me to give any detailed account of his experiences to the world.