Vampire Literature in the Age of Hollywood

Over at WWAC my decade-by-decade overview of vampire fiction has reached the 1930s and 40s, and I’ve been looking at how vampire literature reacted to the rise of vampire film. I’ve dug up a couple of fairly obscure but quite interesting stories from the period: Henry Kuttner’s story “I, the Vampire” and Irina Karlova’s Dreadful Hollow.

Also, I’m now two thirds of the way through the series, which has notched up a cumulative wordcount of 24,000. That’s rather a lot of vampires, and if you’d like to catch up, here are the previous entries:

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)

Part 6: An Occult Dawn — M. R. James’ “Count Magnus” (1904); Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918)

Part 7: Dion Fortune’s Demon Lover — Dion Fortune’s The Demon Lover (1927)