The Blurb for the 2022 edition of this book is as follows: Horror historians Gary D. Rhodes and John Edgar Browning present a long-lost slice of American literature: The Vampire is a detective dime novel that predates both Dracula and the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, and it's sure to thrill audiences today just as it did back in 1885! The front of the book goes on to suggest that it is America’s first vampire novel.
That last sentence is both exciting and partially true – it is likely the first novel (as yet discovered) from America that centres around a blood drinking vampire. However, the claim for first US novel may well go to C W Webber for the novel Yieger’s Cabinet, the sub-title of that 1853 novel being Spiritual Vampirism: the History of Etherial Softdown, and Her Friends of the ‘New Light’. In fairness, that book is on my kindle but hasn’t been read as of yet* and I will return to it here at some point in the future.
I mention Yieger for completeness’ sake but it is clear that it is a very different beast, looking at spiritual vampirism. This is a detective genre dime novel with a view towards vampires of the blood drinking kind, as mentioned. There was no author name on the original release – just a treasure hunt by mentioning other books written by the author. The editors have narrowed it down to Hawley Smart but offer the health warning that they cannot be certain. The case sees a slew of murders where the victims are stabbed in the heart and have two punctures in the neck, as though made by animal teeth. The neck wound clearly alludes to fangs, but the heart wound may invoke thoughts in a modern readership that were not explored in novel – we may be want to think that it is to prevent turning but this is never considered in book and it is simply a method of murder.
What is interesting is the fact that the vampire wears attire (when we initially see them) that is reminiscent of a bird and a description of vampire legends later mentions that on Java a vampire will “fan him with his wings so as fur to keep him from waking, and suck his blood at the same time.” The vampire steals life from the victim – so if the victim was destined to live another forty years the vampire will steal that much life. I did like the following description of vampires: “The human who leads an artificial life – who lives on the blood he extracts from his victims – that he sucks from their very veins, drawing the red life-current directly from the heart!”
Brand, the detective, comes into the story part way through – the original police detective on the case is killed by the vampire – Brand is not a member of the police and was a, self-confessed, opium eater. The prose is light and sprightly as one might expect from a dime novel and lively enough to keep the reader interested (despite questionable dialects and more misogyny than you can shake a stick at). Worth a read in its own right, as well as an early piece of vampire related literature. You should also note (and this is a huge spoiler) that like much of the French 19th Century vampire fantastique literature, which at the very least left a question over whether a vampire was or was not supernatural, this is a mortal killer who thinks (at least at times) that they are a vampire.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
*I have part read Yieger’s Cabinet in the past but it was an awful electronic scan and unreadable in places (here's hoping the mobi file I found is in better shape), however there is a definite theme of spiritual vampirism, rather than it just being an allegorical title.
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