Customer Reviews

Blood and Roses [Old Edition]: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature (Creature Classics Ser.))

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(Note: I have the 1992 edition.)
I have to disagree with the other reviewer; I enjoyed the introductory critical essay, "The Erogenous Disease." Vampires and sex go together like ... blood and roses?
I always want to know what stories are included in anthologies and its usually never listed, which drives me batty, so here they are: The Vampyre by John Polidori, Smarra (an excerpt) by Charles Nodier, The Beautiful Dead by Theophile Gautier, Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe, The Feast of Blood (an excerpt) by J.M. Rymer, Hane Eyre (excerpts) by Charlotte Bronte, The Vampire's Metamorphoses by Charles Baudelaire, The House and the Brain by Edward Bulwer Lytton, Phantoms by Ivan Turgenev, Madoror - The First Song by Isidore Ducasse, Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, La-Bas (an excerpt) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, The Picture of Dorian Gray (an excerpt) by Oscar Wilde, The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen, The True Story of A Vampire by Count Stenbock, and Dracula (yea!) (excerpts) by Bram Stoker.
For the selections that are only excerpts, I recommend reading the whole thing if you haven't already. There are also a few nice (freakish) illustrations.

As reviewer Geoffrey Brent stated, this book has some great stories once you get past the pretentious 20+ page tunnel-visioned Freudian intro essay. Some of the stories you may have not seen before in other vampire literature collections, and Nansee555 was sweet enough to list them in her review. One thing to be aware of with this book is that a good number of the stories (6 of 16) are merely excerpts. In the case of the bit from "Varney the Vampire" you will be grateful for this brevity, but most of the other excerpts could have used a fleshier treatment. Still, it is enough to motivate the reader to search out the full works these came from, so no critical fault.

Perhaps the strongest points of this collection is that while not at all exclusively female vampire stories it offers a great selection of them, including of course Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla", and to my great delight Lafcadio Hearn's matchless English translation of the wonderful French vampire tale "The Beautiful Dead" by Theophile Gautier. It even includes a rare, perhaps the only published 19th century vampire story of female authorship, "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte.

On the whole it is a very useful, carefully, & thoughtfully selected compilation of 19th century vampire tales. Just don't let the Freudian intro essay lure you into performing psychoanalyses on the stories & thier authors before you have had the chance to absorb them & enjoy them first.

Once you get past the introduction and into the actual stories, this is a reasonable enough compilation of vampire stories. Unfortunately, the 'introduction' fails to introduce the collection adequately; it looks more like an essay on the topic "Vampires in fiction as subversion of the Oppressive Male Patriarchy: discuss"... The purpose of an introduction is to introduce the stories that follow it; the closest Ms. Gladwell's introduction comes is to occasionally draw on examples from the stories to support her own points.

While sexuality is a major part of the mystique of the vampire, Ms. Gladwell does her readers a disservice by concentrating on it to the exclusion of all other considerations; also, by treating the stories as supporting material for her essay rather than the other way around. In comparison, Christopher Frayling's anthology 'The Vampyre: Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula' has a much more balanced and informative introduction.

I loved this book. It strikes the gothic romantic in all of us!!