The concept of the vampire has evolved from Bram Stoker's supernatural creature of the night to the pop culture anti-hero of today's TV shows, hit movies, and bestselling novels. Where were these legends born? In what ways have they evolved? How much is actually true? Based on fascinating interviews with forensic experts, creative artists, and real-life bloodsuckers, this is a vampire book like no other.
Throughout the world there is a common belief that the dead may return to life. In Europe the most exotic form of this belief is the legend of the vampire. In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires—from the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires. Analyzing these reports, Barber offers
for the first time a scientific explanation for the origin of the vampire legends. The accounts compiled here by Barber of exhumations of suspected vampires include descriptions of blood on the lips of the dead body,how the corpse cried out when a stake was driven into its heart, and how the corpse partly rose from the grave. These descriptions led to further assumptions about vampires; that after coming to life again, they would prey on the living, sucking their blood or killing them in other ways. Barber studies the descriptions of exhumed cadavers in light of what is now known about forensic pathology and shows that they are clinically possible. Barber thus argues that the lore about vampires is an elaborate folk-hypothesis that sought to make sense out of a wide variety of natural phenomena, including the events of decomposition.
His book will be fascinating reading for scientists and anthropologists as well as for everyone interested in folklore. Paul Barber, a former teacher of German language and folklore at Princeton University and Occidental College, is a writer.
Added by: otherwordly | Karma: 222.41 | Fiction literature | 29 March 2009
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The immortal Count Dracula--Vlad Tepes, Prince of Wallachia--hunts the murderous art thieves who have stolen the portrait of his lost love. But the thieves are after more than art. From the Master Vampire they would steal the very secrets of life--and death!
In Blood Thirst: One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf gathers thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a blood-curling compendium of the best vampire fiction since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Organized into six categories--The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire--the collection illustrates how the vampire's ability to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it. Here, then, is the definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike to sink their teeth into.
The story begins with the revelation that Seattle is being plagued by a string of unsolved murders, which Edward suspects are being caused by a newborn vampire that is unable to control its thirst. Edward and Bella fill out college applications, while Bella explains to Edward her desire to see Jacob, her werewolf friend, again. Meanwhile, Alice Cullen has a vision that Victoria, a vampire who is hunting Bella, is back in town. Although Edward fears for her safety, Bella insists that Jacob and the rest of the werewolf pack would never harm her, and he eventually allows her to visit Jacob once in a while. A few days later Edward proposes to Bella and, despite having an aversion to marriage, she accepts.
