bite you

When you give yourself to me, completely, I will bite you. Until then, my love, I will only nibble on you.

Tina Carreiro – Power of the Moon

feel the warmth…

Vampires always order hot drinks. They aren’t going to drink them, but they can feel the warmth and smell them if they’re hot, and that is so good.

Anne Rice – Memnoch the Devil

deliberate voluptuousness

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.

Bram Stoker – Dracula

I felt myself a changed girl

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – Carmilla

bedroom biting scenes…

“The Vampyre,” first published anonymously in 1819, was taken to be the work of the famous poet (and early 19th-century equivalent of a tabloid celebrity) Lord Byron, but turned out to be by Byron’s personal physician (and devoted hanger-on), Dr. John Polidori. 

Its plot nugget was by Byron, in an uncompleted story dashed off for that ghost-story competition Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin) won with Frankenstein, but Polidori worked it up into something publishable which, nearly two centuries on, remains smart, tart and readable. 

In “The Vampyre,” the narrator (a stand-in for Polidori) falls in with a mysterious aristocrat, Lord Ruthven, who is dressed in black, unnaturally pale, returns from apparent death when exposed to moonlight and is revealed in the last line (as he is snacking on the narrator’s sister) to be a vampire. 

Ruthven is, of course, a caricature of Byron, at once fond and biting, and the poet was equivocal about the depiction of his public image – which wasn’t even the worst fictional version of him floating about, since his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb had written a whole novel about what a bastard he was, Glenarvon. 

Byron got especially testy when people told him “The Vampyre” was the best thing he had ever written. 

Boiled down, “The Vampyre” is like those cartoons that show a current hate figure with fangs – in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was frequently thus caricatured. 

Previously, vampires had been creatures of folklore, featuring in many cultures around the world, and the anecdotes about them collected by obsessives like Dom Augustin Calmet and Montague Summers were mostly about smelly peasant revenants who seem more like our present idea of a zombie. 

Polidori, who was making the point that his friend Byron sometimes acted like a callous, blood-sucking monster, dressed up the fiend in smart clothes, gave him a title (there was a real Lord Ruthven at the time, but he didn’t sue) and set him loose as a predator in high society. 

There was a subsequent vampire craze, which included plays and an opera derived from “The Vampyre,” expanded French translations and sequels (including one by Alexander Dumas) and a lurid penny dreadful imitation that hastened through dozens of instalments chronicling the adventures of Varney the Vampire (1847). Even the next significant vampire story, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), in which the monster is a pale, passive-aggressive teenage girl, evokes “The Vampyre” as the title character latches onto successive well-off families like a cuckoo in the nest and drains the daughters. Le Fanu added the stake through the heart and other elements that have accrued to the genre – and played up the ambiguous sexiness of night-time bedroom biting scenes. 

Kim Newman – A Brief History of Vampire Fiction 

Loving me to death

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature –  Sheridan Le Fanu; Carmilla 

defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man’s nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature.

Franz Rottensteiner – The Fantasy Book: An Illustrated History From Dracula To Tolkien

Baobhan Sith

A baobhan sith (pronounced baa’-van shee) is a type of blood-sucking female fairy in Scottish mythology, similar to the banshee or leanan sídhe. Also known as “the White Women of the Scottish Highlands,” they are beautiful seductresses who prey on young travellers by night. 

Often depicted wearing a long white dress, the fairies approach their victims by inviting them to dance, leading them away to a secluded place. With the victims guard down, she uses her long sharp talons to puncture his throat and feed from him, sucking his blood until death. 

The baobhan sith usually settles in forests or mountains, always in a natural environment. She will have a secured coffin somewhere underground so she can return to rest there during the day, being unable to tolerate sunlight. 

Some tales hold that the faerie can shape shift into a wolf. Medieval versions of the tale claim that she has cloven hooves instead of feet that she hides under her dress. 

modern faerie tales 

vampires

My dear Margaret and Ray:

Your letter was indeed interesting, and I had meant to write before this, but have been swamped by housecleaning and various other duties.

I have never read Thorndyke’s book on magic, but am listing it as a future purchase if I should ever have any more money to spend on books. In reality, I have read very little dealing with the occult science, and, in writing about such things, have merely turned my imagination loose. One of my most prized possessions is Montague Summers’ erudite and curious monograph on The Vampire, which contains much that is récherché. [sic] Summers actually seems to believe in the existence of vampires.

Clark Ashton Smith – 23rd May 1933 letter to Margaret St. Clair and her husband reproduced in Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith

Let me go…

“Tell you what, you let me go, and I’ll ask you plenty of questions about your race. Until then, I’m slightly distracted with how this little vacation on the good ship Holy Shit is going to pan out for me?”

J.R. Ward – Lover Unbound