Welcome back to the Book Report, kids!

So when I first started this series of posts about classic monsters, my intention wasn’t to cover all of them. Honestly, I was just curious about werewolf literature and the idea that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fit into the genre. Of course, that being done, I grew curious about the literary origins of other classic monsters, and then realized this could tie in to the Semantink property The Undergrounds, and I started including a pic of each monster in their Undergrounds uniform.
The only trouble is, because I wasn’t expecting to cover all the Undergrounds employees, I never posted a picture of the Wolfman in his post. So before I go any further:

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A Pain In the Neck
The most popular monster, in fiction and history and pop culture, without a doubt is the vampire. A seductive blend of evil and immortality, the horror of death by a vampire’s bite is offset by vague and not-so-vague promises of an eternal life free from facing the consequences of your actions. It’s understandable then, why so many people might find such a cursed life romantic.

One of the earliest recorded stories of vampirism comes from Croatia in the late 1600s. Locals claimed peasant Guire Grando returned from the dead, drank the blood of villagers, and sexually harassed his widow. Reports claimed that only by beheading the revenant could they stop him. Oddly enough, vampire hysteria swept through Europe in the 18th Century, during the Age of Enlightenment. Many corpses were staked to prevent their undead resurrection and trials for accusations of vampirism occurred. Some governments actually employed “specialists” who would hunt the creatures.
Vampires appeared in a few poetic pieces, but the first bit of prose fiction featuring a vampire was The Vampyre, written in 1819 by John Polidori. Polidori was Lord Gordon George Byron’s physician, and based the tale off a fragmentary piece Lord Bryon wrote during The Year Without a Summer, which also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lord Ruthven, the vampire in Polidori’s novel, is based in part upon Lord Byron himself, and presents for the first time the vampire character as a charming, seductive aristocrat.
The story remained popular through the 19th Century, even as the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire increased the vampire monster’s reputation and popularity. The end of the 19th Century saw the release of the most popular and definitive vampire monster of all time: Dracula, published in 1897 and written by Bram Stoker.

Stoker’s novel was originally titled The Un-Dead, with the famous count’s name shown as Count Wampyr. While doing research of Romania, Stoker became fascinated with the story of Vlad III, also called Vlad the Impaler. Vlad’s father, Vlad II, became a member of The Order of the Dragon in 1431, and went by the name Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the Dragon. The bloody history of Vlad III fit right into Stoker’s story, and he changed the count’s name to the now immortal (pun intended) name of Dracula.

The novel was written as a series of letters from the main characters and interspersed with newspaper articles. This style of writing is called the epistolary form, and when done effectively can draw the reader in as they begin to forget (even if only through suspension of disbelief) that the letters were not really written by the people who signed them. The frame story of Frankenstein was written in the epistolary form, and the French novel Les Liasons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos is perhaps one of the more famous epistolary novels.

Stoker’s novel was popular, but did not become a best-seller until Hollywood adapted the story into various films, the most popular being the 1931 version starring Béla Lugosi and F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu. Hollywood has been especially kind to the Count, who has appeared as a major character in over 200 films (second only to Sherlock Holmes), and his popularity has inspired a huge number of authors to write their own vampire novels in a surprisingly vast number of genres. Anne Rice, of course, breathed new life (so to speak) into the vampire novel with her Vampire Chronicles. Christopher Moore made vampires hilarious with his trilogy of novels You Suck!, Blood-sucking Fiends, and Bite Me. Elizabeth Kostova created an eerie, historical mystery about Dracula titled The Historian. Loren D. Estleman pitted Dracula against Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count. Charlaine Harris wrote about vampires and other “supes” in The Sookie Stackhouse Mystery Novels, which you can see adapted to the small screen as True Blood. And of course, let’s not forget the story of a young girl who falls in love with a vampire — and the rabid fan base that follows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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I would be most remiss if I did not also mention Dracula’s famous nemesis: Doctor Abraham Van Helsing.

Generally, wherever Dracula goes, Van Helsing follows, stake in hand. So it makes sense to have him show up in The Undergrounds.

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That concludes my examination of the classic monsters. Hope you enjoyed it!

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_