The Evening's Research Reading Yield: Bloody Hell

vampire

1. The reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.

2. One who lives by preying on others.


Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

"One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vise of steel on the General's wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.
"I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenant is a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life.
"Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will excercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will in these cases husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary cases it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast."

-from Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1871)

I think it best to treat the subject of this research as if it were not one with which I am already very familiar, so in support of that interest I do consult the dictionary for a sort of no-nonsense literality, and aim to fill in the holes in my reading on the topic with an anthology of Vampire-fiction (The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories) including, and beginning with Carmilla.

I really enjoyed Carmilla. The writing was dripping with Gothic atmosphere (The Introduction to the collection noted that Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were both Dubliners who infused the landscapes of their novels with the brooding gloomy beauty of Ireland), and the Vampire-attacks were put forth with eerie surreality. I was also struck by the way that Carmilla/Millarca/Mircalla was literally charming all who she preyed upon, with very few instances of anger or ferocity displayed. I remember in the folk-stories I read as a child, of the Ban-sidhe, of the Wurdulak, the Vrykolakas, all of them have the Vampires charming their way into their goals, very rarely reacting with ire or fear except when caught in the act and crossed from feeding or returning to its place of rest.

In most current and recent portrayals of Vampires, The Charm aspect is all too often set aside in favour of the "MTV-hiss Factor", which needless to say, dilutes the Magick and gives Vampires a cheezy name...

There is also this from The Giaour (1813), by George Gordon, Lord Byron:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corse:

Thy victims ere they yet expire

Shall know the demon for their sire,

As cursing thee, thou cursing them,

Thy flowers are withered on the stem.