“The pang of the bite…” #vampiretales #oup #20BOS26 Book 23

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the mythology of vampires began with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” published in 1897. However, as “Vampire Tales”, a fantastic new anthology from Oxford University Press, makes clear, tales of blood-sucking ghouls and terrifying presences in the night have been going a lot longer than that. Gothic novels themselves had been around since the 1700s, generally reckoned to have first become popular with Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764. The vampire story took off a little later and a wide range of these stories is featured in this excellent collection, edited by Nick Groom. Groom, a Professor of Literature in English, has something of a pedigree when it comes to the Gothic, having written on the subject as well as working on scholarly editions of such books as “Frankenstein”, “The Italian” and “The Monk”. Here, he starts the collection with an author you might not directly connect with the topic of vampires – Lord Byron. However, the mad, bad…