Three Vampire Tales edited by Anne Williams

This edition brings together three vampire tales from the early to late nineteenth century. Williams includes a thorough introduction, and lots of contextual material first. John Polidori's The Vampyre is perhaps most notable for the circumstances surrounding its creation: when the Shelleys and Lord Byron read Coleridge's "Christabel" (excerpted in this volume) and decided to write their own ghost stories, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Byron started a vampire story. Polidori, his doctor at the time, finished it, and published it, so it's sometimes mistakenly attributed to Byron. The volume also includes Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, but its centerpiece is, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula. The terror in all three of the stories comes, at least in part, from the doubling and repetition of the vampire's attacks. Beloved women are particularly susceptible to the vampire (who attack the men via their daughters, sisters, and wives) whether the vampire attacking is male or female. Dracula itself has a complex structure, and includes a fascination with travel, the combination of multiple strands of the plot in complex ways, and a superb use of Gothic horror. The juxtaposition of the tales is quite interesting, but Dracula is the jewel of the collection.