Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves And Ghosts - 25 Classic Stories Of The Supernatural Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Count Dracula

  The Room in the Tower

  The Man Upstairs

  The Brood

  The Company of Wolves

  The Lawyer and the Ghost

  Lot No. 249

  The Shadowy Third

  The Third Option

  20th Century Ghost

  The Ghostly Rental

  Home Delivery

  The Mark of the Beast

  The Girl with the Hungry Eyes

  Cool Air

  For the Good of All

  Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly

  Excerpt from Dying to Live

  The Master of Rampling Gate

  The Ghost

  Excerpt from Dracula

  Excerpt from The Wolfen

  The Canterville Ghost - A Hylo-Idealistic Romance

  Disturb Not My Slumbering Fair

  Green Messiah

  Immortal predators and misunderstood monsters, the entities featured in these twenty-five stories represent humanity’s fears of the bestial nature within and of what lies beyond death. Intrigued by the unknown, these visionary storytellers have cast a light into the shadows and brought these fears to life. From Gothic European villages of centuries past to the American suburbs of modern times, Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves, and Ghosts have always come out after dark to frighten—or enlighten.

  Barbara H. Solomon is a professor of English and women’s studies at Iona College. Her academic interests include twentieth-century and contemporary American and non-Western fiction. Among the anthologies she’s edited are The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin, Other Voices, Other Vistas, Herland and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Haves and Have-Nots, and Passages : 24 Modern Indian Stories.

  Eileen Panetta is an associate professor of English at Iona College. Her teaching focuses on the modern British novel, the American short story, and young adult literature. With Barbara Solomon she is the editor of Passages, Once Upon a Childhood, and Miss Lulu Bett and Selected Stories of Zona Gale.

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  First Signet Classics Printing, September 2011

  Copyright © Barbara H. Solomon and Eileen Panetta, 2011

  Authors’ copyrights and permissions can be found on pages 417–18.

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  For our daughters:

  Jennifer and Nancy

  and

  Claire and Jane

  Acknowledgments

  We wish to express our continuing gratitude to Tracy Bernstein, our editor at NAL, for her enthusiastic support and helpful guidance with this project; to Florence B. Eichin of Penguin’s Permissions Department for her valuable aid in locating authors and literary agents; and to Dorothy Lumley of the Dorian Literary Agency of Torquay, England.

  At Iona College, a great deal of assistance was provided by Edward L. Helmrich of Ryan Library’s Interlibrary Loan Program as well as by the Department of English student assistants Shannon Donlon, Emily E. Ramos, and Emily Morris.

  INTRODUCTION

  The infamous Capuchin Catacombs are located beneath a quite ordinary convent church in Palermo, Italy. Wandering around the catacombs, the visitor is confronted with a sad overreaching into the realm of the “undead.” In vaulted chamber after chamber, the walls are hung with as many as eight thousand decomposing and skeletal remains of mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century citizens of the area. Various groups are “hung” together: monks, priests, professionals, virgins, children. Others lie in coffins open at the side for viewing. These individuals often left instructions regarding their final outfits, even that they be redressed after a period of time in fresh clothes. Much of the clothing has survived; alas, the human flesh, the focus of the monks’ perhaps overrated embalming skills, has fared much less well. The hoped-for preservation of the body has not been realized and, with the exception of an almost completely preserved two-year-old from the 1920s, the overall effect is a gruesome study in the decomposition of the human body. The Catacombs have become a year-round Halloween setting, a place of horror, pathos and finally a sort of bemused curiosity—a place to exercise and exorcise our fear and curiosity about what death looks like. No protocols of the deathbed or funeral parlor need be observed here—one can stare to one’s heart’s content.

  Not surprisingly, the Catacombs are Palermo’s most popular tourist attraction. What is the visitor seeking? At first the sight may inspire awe, may provide a creepy thrill, but not for long. So much dressed-up death appears futile—a little silly even: so much immortal longing has come to this sad end.

  For just a little while the sheer numbers can be daunting. Ambling around, one feels small in the presence of room after room of the dead. The thought occurs, too: what if these thousands of skeletal forms deeply resented being gawked at, hanging execution-style, their flesh shorn and shrunken, most with gaping holes for eyes, all teeth and clawlike hands in sharp contrast to their fashionable bonnets and cravats and priestly vestments, lost to the dignity to which they aspired? And what if they could avenge themselves on our tourist curiosity? We have, after all, what they could not manage to hold on to: life. But that chill quickly passes. They are so very dead, empty sad bodies defying the imagination to revivif
y them. The spark is out. From this place of bones, terror and transcendence have vanished together.

  As if to compensate for such emptiness, we have to have monsters. We need them to reanimate the shadow realms where our deepest fears and hopes are intermingled. The imagination expresses its terrors and uneasiness and its fascination with the mysteries of the borderland where life and death converge, in listening for the rap at the window, the howl in the dark, the movement in the grave mound, any stirring of the return, the breaking of the bonds that separate our mortal realm from some dreaded—or hopedfor—elsewhere.

  The horror figures encountered in the pages of this anthology—vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, and some who won’t lie still in any precise classification—have some interesting and overlapping characteristics. For example, modern accounts of vampires, werewolves, and zombies almost always involve the biting of the innocent, which infects these victims and draws them into the realm of the unholy. Ghosts, traditionally, have not been interested in this active infection of the living, except perhaps with such slower-acting toxins as fear and remorse. Werewolves require a silver bullet, vampires a stake through the heart, and zombies the separation of head from body or destruction of the brain to be stopped, but ghosts must frequently be brought to rest by subtler, more individual means. They must be appeased.

  On the other hand, ghosts, vampires, and zombies all belong to the ranks of the “undead.” That term, originally used by Bram Stoker to designate vampires, is now even more readily associated with zombies, who burst out of their apparently ill-fitting resting places to stagger about in packs, bashing down the equally inadequate hiding places of the living in search of flesh to devour. Vampires, from their earliest literary representation, have generally been subtle, seductive creatures, with a sleek appearance. They have presented themselves as swift, agile, plan-ahead types, calculating in their approach to their prey. Ghosts are often disembodied spirits—the word “ghost” is, of course, a longstanding synonym for “spirit”—while zombies are (much more dreadfully, if one has a preference for spirit over matter) the opposite; they are “disenspirited” bodies, unhooked from what might make them sentimental or nostalgic or even marginally reasonable. Most often they are without name or trace of former identity.

  As monsters go, vampires have a decided stylistic edge. Associated with an urban Gothic style, they are nocturnal, dangerously alluring, carefully costumed, anguished, and tragically yet enticingly cut off from daylight reality. They may represent a range of things from the intoxicating, glittering underside of life to the empty craving of the addict. So they appeal to us as fascinating and forlorn.

  But it isn’t all “night on the town” being a vampire. As a character in the 1979 film Love at First Bite sums it up: “Happy? How would you like to dine on nothing but a warm liquid-protein diet while all around you, people are eating lamb chops, potato chips, Mallomars . . . Chivas Regal on the rocks with a twist?”1

  We know the type: comes from Transylvania, sleeps all day in a coffin in a crypt (if available), hates garlic, holy water, and crosses, really hates sunlight, has sleek hair, elegant evening dress with a cape, no use for a mirror, is a smooth talker, prefers young females, flashes concealed fangs at the unsuspecting, feeds on fresh blood, leaves two holes in the neck; bite is transformative though sometimes reversible; can be killed with a wooden stake through the heart; beheading and burning to a crisp are also helpful. One or two of these tropes of the trade are enough to signal the condition, especially with appropriate music and atmospheric lighting.

  It’s all become so familiar and pedestrian; this is the stuff of Muppetry (the long-abandoned Count von Count puppet) and uninspired Halloween costumes. It should have passed into trivia. But we are, after all, talking about the undead.

  Vampires have the purest literary pedigree among the monsters represented here, and their evolution through the nineteenth century is familiar territory. The famous contest among the guests at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, in which Lord Byron invited each of his guests to write a ghost story, produced two of the most enduring myths of the past two centuries, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Vampyre , which eventually came to be credited to John Polidori, and not to Byron himself, to whom Polidori was physician. The vampire of the tale, a long short story really, is called Lord Ruthven, and he is imperious, ruthless, fatal to women and intimidating to the men who should protect them—generally acknowledged to be a fawning and resentful representation of Byron on Polidori’s part. While perhaps short on literary merit, The Vampyre consolidated the modern fascination with that dangerous type, the Byronic hero.

  Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer followed in 1847, adding fangs and the requisite holes in the neck to the legend, as well as the notion that the vampire is in reality an afflicted individual who hates what he has become. Varney was the first and probably last vampire to end it all by jumping into a volcano.

  The Irish ghost story writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu added the most far-reaching complexity to the portrait of the vampire that began to emerge. His 1871 Carmilla not only established the female vampire but added the elements of mutual attraction and even fierce tenderness. At the end, the rescued innocent heroine acknowledges a longing for her dangerous companion. And the confusion and allure of forbidden love, rather than a feeling of narrow escape, is what lingers in the imagination. Carmilla herself undoubtedly is something of a spiritual sister to the later Lucy Westenra in Dracula. (Roger Vadim’s 1961 Blood and Roses, a film version of Carmilla, will belatedly exploit the lesbian connection.)

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is the culmination of these earlier works, which Stoker is thought to have studied. Le Fanu was Stoker’s editor for a brief period. Count Dracula, the paradigm of vampire representations, is given the fullest, most recognizable treatment in the novel, and the Transylvanian hideaway, the cape and evening dress, the transit to England in a coffin, the dog and bat avatars all begin here. Garlic is effective against the undead, and a stake through the heart and beheading are the methods of choice for destruction. Standard characters are introduced: the female victims Lucy, who becomes a vampire, and Mina, rescued in the nick of time, and the somewhat ineffectual male protectors, eventually galvanized by Professor Van Helsing.

  But Stoker’s undead dead is unequivocally evil, suave and ingratiating though he be, without some of the complicating ambiguity of the earlier incarnations. The compelling attractiveness, the remorsefulness and the ability to evoke erotic responses become the stuff of later reinventions of the vampire figure.

  The first significant silent film version, the brilliant work of F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1922) was loosely based on Stoker’s novel, but the ghoulish Nosferatu, memorably played by Max Schreck, was a far cry from Stoker’s creepy but recognizably human Count. The reed-thin body, bony head, black-ringed eyes, and elongated fingers form one of the most memorable images in horror-film history. The film is the first work to introduce the element of sunlight as fatal to the vampire. The final scene, in which Nosferatu is unable to release the yielded body of the heroine and remains too long into the dawn, is still capable of creating erotic unease.

  Undoubtedly, the strongest confirmation of Bram Stoker’s version of the myth came in the 1931 Universal Studios film version directed by Tod Browning. Despite the fact that Bela Lugosi only played the Count twice on screen, he has inhabited the role of Count Dracula for close to a century. For many he is the definitive vampire, and his heavily accented manner of speaking, not to mention his famously delivered “Good evening” and “I never drink . . . wine,” is signature.

  London’s Hammer Studios took over the Dracula brand in the postwar period. With Christopher Lee as Dracula—he declined to appear in the second film in the series, so it became The Brides of Dracula—Hammer Studios’ Dracula became a more overtly sexual predator, and lots of liberties were taken with the original. But Van Helsing, the stake-wielding scientist introduced by Stoker and granddaddy of
all vampire hunters, was still around to clamp things down.

  Since then, if Dracula has become the stuff of camp, vampires have flooded the imagination—and the bookshelf and the TV screen and the cinema. Here are a few of the more influential representations.

  Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954) was made into the film The Last Man on Earth (1964) and then twice remade as The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007). The undead characters have vampirelike symptoms, but they behave like zombies. The novel, with its implications of viral infection and apocalypse, was in fact cited by George Romero as an inspiration for his zombie films.

  Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), a novel that never quite made it as a film but that has been the subject of two TV miniseries, brings an expanding brood of vampires to small-town America and ends in a complete conflagration, a finale we have come to expect, thanks to King.

  Dark Shadows (1966–71) was rescued from cancellation and became a wildly popular Gothic soap opera with the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. Collins, chained in his coffin for two hundred years, is released by a foolish character looking for treasure, and he becomes the show’s driving force. Though deadly to the folks at Collingswood, he is really just a hopeless romantic yearning for his lost love, Josette. Dark Shadows was one of the first soaps to resort to the supernatural. Eventually, a wide variety of figures from various horror genres made an appearance in the series; time travel and parallel universes were employed, and there were borrowings by the scriptwriters from every sort of classic and contemporary horror fiction.