Editor: Álvaro García Marín
Release date: 2024
Contains spoilers
The blurb: Vampires are usually associated in the popular imagination with Transylvania and other Eastern European locales. But in this new collection, editor Álvaro García Marín has uncovered the earliest appearances of vampires in English literature, revealing their surprising origin in Greece. This volume includes two seminal classic texts, Lord Byron's "Fragment of a Novel" and John William Polidori's "The Vampyre", together with five other rare and never-before-reprinted vampire tales from the early 19th century, including the important and inexplicably neglected "The Vampire of Vourla". Also featured is a scholarly introduction by Prof. Marín, delving into this forgotten field of vampire literary history and situating it within the larger Romantic era and 19th-century English attitudes toward Greece.
The Review: With the thesis that Greece was perhaps more important to the vampire myth than other parts of the Balkans, and the further thesis that an idea of an idealized image of Greece in Western Europe (as a cradle of philosophy, science and arts) meant a need to distance Greece from such folklore, which in turn impacted the depiction of Greece within early vampire literature, Álvaro García Marín introduces us to the representation of Grecian vampires in the early 19th Century.
The first two stories are likely known to you, being Byron’s Fragment of a story and Polidori’s seminal the Vampyre. Also included is the title story, The Vampire of Vourla, as Marín suggests, the crown jewel of the volume and the earliest known story to feature a vampire transforming into a bat. Of the other stories there is much to interest the vampire scholar though some of them are rather bloodless affairs (which fits with the distancing Greece from superstition) – especially something like The Vampire Knight and the Cloud Steed (1837) by an Anonymous author in which the vampires are ruses designed to trick Turks. There is some interesting lore along the way; Vroucolacas are dead bodies possessed in Vroucolacas: a Tale (1846) by James K Paulding, and sunlight exposure actually causes the corpse to turn in Vampires (1839) by John Bowring.
Probably my favourite of the newly discovered tales was from a travelogue by James Emerson Tennent, though I agree with Marín that it feels more like creative writing than a story picked up on travels. The Story of Demetrio Gkikas, the Vampire of Santorini (1829) sees a lovelorn revenant – or so Gkikas eventually becomes after misfortune and misadventure – haunting the grave of his lost love but othewrwise harming no-one. This sympathetic vampire is not the earliest such character, but he is pretty darn early. I also liked the idea that becoming a vampire proved he had, in his heart, stayed true to the Orthodox Church.
The volume is slender, in honesty, but with five early 19th Century stories never published in modern collections it is essential. 8 out of 10.
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In Paperback @ Amazon UK