What follows is rife with many a SPOILER. You have been warned! Now that the finale of the first season of Penny Dreadful has aired, with more than a few surprises (as well as few plot twists many of us saw coming from miles away), let us consider the vampires in this series. Not least…
Tag: lord ruthven
Vampire Books Coming March 2014
Here are this months vampire novels coming out! Enjoy! :) Kindred of Darkness: A vampire kidnapping (James Asher Vampire Novel) by Barbara Hambly (Mar 1, 2014) When James Asher and his wife Lydia’s baby daughter Miranda is kidnapped by the Master Vampire of London, the stakes are high: blindly follow the Master Vampire’s instructions, keep out of the…
Review: Melabeth the Vampire
Reviewing first novels can end up an uncomfortable exercise. The promise of something truly good awaits–consider that both Interview With a Vampire and Twilight were first novels by their respective authors. So too have been a more than a few that vanished without a trace. And good riddance! Melabeth the Vampire happily manages to avoid…
Vampires: The Nightmare Strangers
Someone asked why I thought vampires remained so popular and intriguing. My answer: Because the undead make such a fluid metaphor. Consider; when they first entered into the Western literature and art–with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” For much of the next century, vampires popped up in art and theatre as well as different stories. “Varney…
Sunlight and Vampires
Burned into the collective memory of our age, it is an image of great power. The vampire looms menacingly, but then the hero reaches up and pulls away the curtains. SUNLIGHT! Like laser beams, the purifying rays of the sun sear the undead creature’s flesh. The foul thing dissolves into the dust it should already…
John Polidori and The Vampyre
Polidori was the friend and personal physician of the infamous rogue and poet, Lord Byron. He was also part of the close-knit circle of friends, including Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Byron, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, and also Byron’s woman of the hour. Polidori was Byron’s personal physician, and traveled with him through Europe. Though…
Vampires in Literature
In fiction of course, the epidemy of vampire literature, would be Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. There were sexual undertones, of course, relaying vampirism to be a sort of sexually transmitted disease. Its themes of blood, death, and sex made it’s way to Victorian Europe, rattled because of the spread of tuberculosis and syphilis. But the vampire…