Vampires Enter the Twentieth Century

The latest post in my year-long series celebrating vampire literature is now live at WWAC! This time, I’m looking at what M. R. James and Sax Rohmer contributed to the genre in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In case you haven’t read the earlier instalments, this series is a chronological overview of vampire fiction where I pick one story to represent each decade from the 1810s onwards. Here are the previous posts in the series:

Part 1: Two Centuries of Blood — John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1818); Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820)

Part 2: The Feminine Touch — Théophile Gautier’s “La morte amoureuse” (1836); Elizabeth F. Ellet’s “The Vampyre” (1849)

Part 3: Deconstructing the Vampire — Charles Wilkins Webber’s Spiritual Vampirism (1853);  Paul Féval’s Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860)

Part 4: Carmilla and Company — J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-2); Anne Crawford’s “A Mystery of the Campagna” (1886)

Part 5: Enter Count Dracula — Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)