The Vampyre’s Legacy is Complete

It’s done! My year-long, twelve-part, 35,500-word overview of vampire fiction — marking the bicentennial of John Polidori’s seminal “The Vampyre” — is now complete.

You can read the final post at WWAC. I’ve taken a different approach this time: while the earlier instalments spotlighted one story per decade, this time I’m covering one story for each year of the 2010s, thereby wrapping up the series and celebrating the decade.

If you missed them, here are the first eleven 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)

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)

Part 8: In the Shadow of Hollywood — Henry Kuttner’s “I, the Vampire” (1937); Irina Karlova’s Dreadful Hollow (1942)

Part 9: Atom-Age Vampires — Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954)

Part 10: Sympathy for the Devil — William Edward Daniel “Marilyn” Ross’s Barnabas Collins (1969); Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976)

Part 11: Urban Fantasies — Nancy A. Collins’ Sunglasses After Dark (1989); Tanya Huff’s Blood Price (1991); Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005)