Editor: Daniel Corrick
First published: 2023
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: The vampire is the most glamorous and iconic of Gothic figures. In Night's Black Agents, editor Daniel Corrick assembles a baker's dozen of tales that trace the sanguinary path of this thirsty, mythical creature from the early nineteenth century, where it acted as an incarnation of fears of libertinism and diabolism, appearing as the Satanic villain in penny dreadfuls, through to the early twentieth century, where it appeared as both femme fatale and homoerotic bloodsucker.
The Review: To use the colloquial, vampire anthologies are a dime a dozen and so if you are starting out with your vampire collection any one will likely be worthwhile, as you get longer in the tooth there needs to be something special about the stories contained within.
All I can say about Night’s Black Agents is… wow. Editor Daniel Corrick has dug up some vampire gold within these pages. There were only three stories within I already had, Polidori’s The Vampyre is a commonly anthologised tale but, of course, as the first English language vampire prose it earns its place. The other two stories are more obscure, those being Dumas père’s the Pale Lady and Ulrichs’ Manor, both interesting and important vampire stories in their own right. However, the book has many more stories, with the volume containing nine Nineteenth Century stories and four from the early Twentieth Century in total.
I’m not going to go too deeply into details but there are some great early use of tropes within. For instance, I have argued that William H G Kingston’s the Vampire; or, Pedro Pacheco and the Bruxa from 1863 represented a pre-Stoker use of transformation of vampire to bat (which others have refuted, I’ll let the reader decide). However Corrick has found an earlier Kingston story from 1846, entitled the Bruxa and featuring the vampiric witch and Portugal again, which has a definitive transformation from (living) vampire to bat (or bat-like creature), making it the earliest example I am aware of to be published in English. Likewise, Edwin F Roberts’ The Vampyre Bride, from 1850, changes the Countess’ name but essentially uses the Báthory story. Both of these will be subject to their own ‘Classic Literature’ blog post in the future.
My congratulations to Daniel Corrick for this collection, it is absolutely essential for anyone who enjoys 19th (and early 20th) century vampire stories or is a student of such stories. 9 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
The Review: To use the colloquial, vampire anthologies are a dime a dozen and so if you are starting out with your vampire collection any one will likely be worthwhile, as you get longer in the tooth there needs to be something special about the stories contained within.
All I can say about Night’s Black Agents is… wow. Editor Daniel Corrick has dug up some vampire gold within these pages. There were only three stories within I already had, Polidori’s The Vampyre is a commonly anthologised tale but, of course, as the first English language vampire prose it earns its place. The other two stories are more obscure, those being Dumas père’s the Pale Lady and Ulrichs’ Manor, both interesting and important vampire stories in their own right. However, the book has many more stories, with the volume containing nine Nineteenth Century stories and four from the early Twentieth Century in total.
I’m not going to go too deeply into details but there are some great early use of tropes within. For instance, I have argued that William H G Kingston’s the Vampire; or, Pedro Pacheco and the Bruxa from 1863 represented a pre-Stoker use of transformation of vampire to bat (which others have refuted, I’ll let the reader decide). However Corrick has found an earlier Kingston story from 1846, entitled the Bruxa and featuring the vampiric witch and Portugal again, which has a definitive transformation from (living) vampire to bat (or bat-like creature), making it the earliest example I am aware of to be published in English. Likewise, Edwin F Roberts’ The Vampyre Bride, from 1850, changes the Countess’ name but essentially uses the Báthory story. Both of these will be subject to their own ‘Classic Literature’ blog post in the future.
My congratulations to Daniel Corrick for this collection, it is absolutely essential for anyone who enjoys 19th (and early 20th) century vampire stories or is a student of such stories. 9 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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