Fevre Dream - George R R Martin

 Everybody's heard of George R R Martin.  After Game of Thrones he's got to be one of the most famous living writers.  But not everyone has read him.  Me, for instance - Fevre Dream is my first Martin, bought because it's a vampire novel and therefore my cup of tea.

It's certainly that.  Abner Marsh is a steamboat owner down on his luck who dreams of captaining the fastest steamer on the Mississippi.  Along comes the mysterious Joshua York, who offers him precisely that.  Together, as partners, they create the Fevre Dream, using York's money and Marsh's expertise.

Things start going wrong on the maiden voyage.  The fastest steamship on the river is constantly being delayed by York's nocturnal trips ashore.  Marsh confronts his partner, who reveals the truth.  I don't think it's giving too much away to say it's about vampires.  I've already stated the fact - it's what drew me to the book.  What kept me at the book, among many other things, is Martin's take on vampires, which includes the idea of the bloodmaster, the dominant vampire, the pale king.  Is it Joshua or his rival, plantation owner Damon Julian.  Well, one of them has Abner Marsh as his partner, the other Sour Billy Tipton.  Marsh is said to be the ugliest man on the Mississippi but he's honest and honourable.  Sour Billy runs him close in the looks department, but keeps his true, profound ugliness on the inside.

With this material Martin embarks on his forte, the adventure quest as full of twists and turns as the great river itself.  He carries it off perfectly, his writing just sufficiently elevated to entertain the higher aspects of the reader's mind while the pounding plot grips the emotions.  I liked it so much that I have already picked up what looks like a linked project edited by Martin.  Mississippi Roll is a portfolio collection by other writers set aboard the steamship Marsh travels aboard after he has lost control of the Fevre Dream.  I can't wait.

The Hunger - Whitley Strieber

 

I enjoyed The Hunger much more than expected.  I expected a typical horror story of the era - sub-Stephen King with lots of sex and gore.  Actually, Strieber never uses the word 'vampire' at all but argues for a separate yet twinned species descended from the Lamia (see Keats and Apollonius of Tyre).  Miriam Blaylock may just be that Lamia, a child during the fall of Troy, now resident in New York City in a specially reinforced townhouse.

Sarah Roberts, meanwhile, is a specialist sleep researcher at the Riverside Centre.  She is currently seeking a cure for ageing, in non-scientific terms, the elixir of life.  Her experiments with Rhesus monkeys has spectacularly failed, and her programme may be shut down - until Miriam Blaylock walks in complaining of night terrors.

Miriam and Sarah both have problematic male partners.  John is an 18th century gentleman converted by Miriam who is facing up to the uncomfortable reality that whilst Miriam might be to all intents and purposes immortal, her converts are not.  They age visibly by the minute, consumed by the Hunger but suddenly denied the restorative Sleep. Sarah's partner Tom Havers is a business-oriented medic whose ambition is to rise to the top of the medical world.  Like John, he genuinely loves his woman but also like John he cannot understand the passion that drives her.

The upshot is truly compelling, genuinely thrilling at all the right times.

Strieber's contribution to the vampire studies is the concept of vampiric blood (it is the blood itself which makes the change), which must have been genuinely terrifying during the decade of HIV.  Secondly, he confronts the question of what happens to an immortal being denied of nourishment.  They don't die because they can't and yet they are beyond the point of recovery either through being deprived of sustenance or dismemberment and dispersal.  Fascinating.

The Vampyre - Tom Holland

 I know, I know.  What looks like a coincidence could also be an obsession.  But the fact of the matter is, I've had this novel on my shelves for about three years and was prompted to read it because I liked Wilson's play so much.

I also enjoyed the novel.  The subtitle, 'The Secret History of Lord Byron', tells us all we need to know.  It's hardly a secret that Byron is, to all intents and purposes, the model for the modern vampire - and why he so often has to be a nobleman.  Byron was the host at the Villa Deodati on Lake Geneva in the year without a summer (1816) when the group (Byron, Mr and Mrs Shelley and Dr Polidori) resolved to write Gothic horror stories.  Mary Shelley famously began Frankenstein.  Byron wrote a fragment about a vampire which, Polidori, after he was sacked and returned to England, developed and published as The Vampyre.  The unscrupulous publisher inferred Byron was the real author; both Byron and Polidori objected and the scandal became a bestseller.  Polidori, grieved to have fallen out with his hero, makes him very clearly the anti-hero of the novella.

Anyway, so Holland has taken the vampirisation of Byron and combined it with the huge bestseller (and successful movie of the time) Interview with a Vampire.  The result is not subtle: Byron is the vampire - and not for purposes of satire or sarcasm - and he is sort of interviewed.  The latter is not especially successful, his interviewer, Rebecca, doesn't ask any serious questions and the book is basically a long first person account from Byron.  Holland has done his research and the story of his life in exile - having left England because he abandoned his wife and child - is perfectly convincing.  The vampire side is not quite so well done but I was impressed that Holland has added to the vampire mythos - a new development in the concept of 'golden blood', the ultimate delight for vampires, the blood of their own children.

One reason the novel is slightly unsatisfactory is that it is meant to be continued (in Supping With Panthers).  I don't know whether I can be bothered but anyone who has read it is welcome to tell me about it and even post their comments here.

The Rivals of Dracula - Nick Rennison

 

A collection of vampire tales from around the time of Stoker's classic.  There are familiar faces here.  M R James's 'Count Magnus' is always worth reading and it was good to see 'Aylmer Vance and the Vampire'.  There are oddball entries too, some very odd Norse vampires and a vampiric plant.  But there are also several duds, I'm afraid - 'Ken's Mystery' for example, by Julian (son of Nathaniel) Hawthorne, and Mary Cholmondely's 'Let Loose'.  On the whole, though, a good range, well worth reading.

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

Robert Neville believes he is the last man alive after a plague turns the rest of humanity into vampires. He has lost his wife and daughter but Neville is immune to the plague, probably because of something that happened during his military service.

Neville is getting used to living alone. If it wasn't for the hubbub every night when his neighbours howl for his blood, his life would be tolerable, with his freezer stashed full of food, his store of whisky and his books. Neville is a practical man, an autodidact. He works out how the plague is transmitted, why some of the traditional weapons work better than others, and experiments with a vaccine, albeit he has no one to test it on.

Then his solitude is disturbed, first by a dog, and then by Ruth, a young widow who he forces back to his house to test for vampirism. And that's pretty much it. I Am Legend is a short book, a novella really, but Matheson still gives himself ample room to explore his subject in depth. I was particularly impressed with the bacteria theory. I also liked the fact that his characters were not stereotypes. Neville is likeable when sober, deeply unpleasant at other times. Ruth starts out as a typical immature victim but is not all that she seems. The plot is not complex but it is absolutely compelling. Matheson keeps the twists coming all the way to the end.

Carmilla - Sheridan le Fanu

Perfect for Christmas night reading, Carmilla is effectively the mother of Dracula. John Polidori was the father, with Lord Byron a sort of fairy godfather. Polidori's The Vampyre came out in 1819, originally credited to Byron in the hope of bigger sales. In fact The Vampyre was Byron, thinly veiled under the name Lord Ruthven, the name he had appeared under in Glenarvon (1816), a scandalous bodice-ripper by Byron's spurned mistress Lady Caroline Lamb. Carmilla - likewise a novella - came out in 1871 and derives from the legend of Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory, who is said to have preserved her beauty by bathing in the blood of young virgins. A quarter of a century later along came Bram Stoker to combine to two - all he needed to find was another medieval Eastern European blood fiend, preferably one with a catchy name.

Stoker was a Dubliner, like le Fanu, and it is inconceivable that he should not have known Carmilla. He was working, in Dublin, for a newspaper co-owned by le Fanu when the story came out in serial form in late 1871. He may or may not have known of Polidori. The term 'vampire' was not original and indeed is deployed in Carmilla. Modern screen Draculas may have a whiff of Byron about them but Stoker's Dracula, in the novel, does not. Indeed the only thing Stoker seems to have added to what le Fanu supplied, aside from material lifted from the life of Vlad Tepez, is the vampiric means of transmission. The bite itself passing on the contagion seems original to Stoker. Le Fanu has some obscure device of vampires infecting suicides and I'm not sure that the question of transmission arises in Polidori (it certainly doesn't in Byron's 'fragment' "The Burial".

Carmilla was written at the very end of le Fanu's life, by which time you would hope he had developed a graceful turn of phrase. Sadly, a lifetime's slog as a journalistic hack seems to have undermined his prose, which plods somewhat. On the other hand his structure is very clever, a story within a framework, which then admits other stories. The frisson that made it successful, however, is the implied lesbianism between Carmilla and the narrator Laura. Given that Laura speaks to us directly we can be safe in the assumption she did not die. The victim is Berthe, ward of General Spielsdorf, the neighbour and friend of Laura's father in Styria. We only see Carmilla as beautiful and loving and extremely sexual. It is Spielsdorf who later reveals what she really is and how she must be destroyed - which, incidentally, is done in the way familiar to all Dracula fans. The learned man who assists at the destruction is Baron Vordenburg of Graz, who is described thus:

He was tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders, and dressed in black. His face was brown and dried in with deep furrows; he wore an oddly-shaped hat with a broad leaf. His hair, long and grizzled, hung on his shoulders. He wore a pair of gold spectacles, and walked slowly, with an odd shambling gait, with his face sometimes turned up to the sky, and sometimes bowed down toward the ground, and seemed to wear a perpetual smile; his long thin arms were swinging, and his lank hands, in old black gloves ever so much too wide for them, waving and gesticulating in utter abstraction.

Small wonder, then, that Stoker preferred to combine Vordenburg's knowledge of vampiric lore with the more reassuring professional person of Doctor Hesselius. to whom Laura's narrative is addressed - et voila, Van Helsing!


Le Fanu doesn't do bats but there is an animal entity. In the most horrific passage of the novella a monstrous cat - 'four or five feet long' - pounces on Laura's bed.

The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream.

Intriguingly, le Fanu leaves a major question unanswered - who is the mysterious 'Countess' who claims to be Carmilla's mother but who dumps her daughter first on Spielsdorf, then on Laura's father. She meets Spielsdorf at a masked ball and refuses to unmask for him because. she insists, he will recognise her. Did le Fanu simply forget? I doubt it; the encounters with the Countess are allotted too much space within the hundred pages of the novella. Perhaps le Fanu planned to bring her back in a follow-up story. After all, Carmilla was one of five stories published in In A Glass Darkly (1872), all of which were presented as being from the papers of Doctor Hesselius, who thus became the first occult detective. Sadly, le Fanu died early the following year before he could publish more.

 

ANNO DRACULA - Kim Newman

Anno Dracula (1992) is the first volume in what became a series of the same name.  Kim Newman is one of the best-known British authorities on horror films, horror stories and pulp fiction.  Anno Dracula  is all these and more.  The 'more', essentially, is that it is an alternative world story of a fictional world.  In this made-up world, Count Dracula did not die at the hands of Van Helsing and his crew but survived to marry the widowed Queen Victoria and invite all his vampire friends over to England.

It is 1888 and Jack the Ripper is slicing up vampire prostitutes.  Charles Beauregard is instructed by the Diogenes Club (chaired by Mycroft Holmes) to put a stop to Jack's japes.  Shortly thereafter he is forcibly impaneled by the Limehouse Crew  (chaired by one Fu Manchu) to do the same thing.  And so the story unfolds, not so much horror or detective yarn as a pastiche of both.  It's meant to be fun and half the fun comes from spotting literary cameos among the walk-ons.  I am a fan of both forms and doubt I got more than half of them.  Fortunately Newman provides end notes to ensure we know what we missed.  Less happily, this 2011 reissue (with the fabulous cover art) also includes several other slabs of Newman which are less enlightening.  Still, no one is forced to read them and a novel of more than 400 pages scarcely shortchanges the consumer.

A clever romp, witty, effectively-written and great fun.  I shall certainly keep an eye out for Volume 2, The Bloody Red Baron.