This isn’t the first time I have solicited guest blogs to celebrate a TMtV milestone, I did the same for the 10th anniversary, and one contributor was Anthony Hogg. Anthony’s article that time (linked below) actually details where our friendship sprang from and since then – as he sets out below – we started working together on a journal. Anthony is a tenacious editor and researcher – as both his work on the Highgate Vampire and the Journal of Vampire Studies attests to. So, without further ado I’d like to welcome Anthony back to TMtV...
I can’t believe it’s been ten years since the last retrospective and twenty years since the blog started. Time flies. For the blog’s tenth anniversary, I discussed Andy’s incomparable output, our friendly banter and the significance of his work to vampire studies.[1] To be honest, not much has changed—except for two things.
At the time I wrote it, I was secretly devising a vampire studies organisation. One that would have its own journal.[2] The year before, I had even helped organise an event called There Are Such Things! Vampire Studies Symposium 2015. Held at North Central Texas College’s Corinth campus on October 31 that year, the event was a “tester” for my idea.[3]
By 2018, I was in now-or-never mode. I had settled on a name. Contributions to the proposed journal commenced the year before. I had a constitution drawn up. The inaugural meeting of the Vampire Studies Association took place on October 31, 2018 at City Library, Melbourne. Nominating myself as president, Andy seemed the natural choice as Deputy President, so I nominated him too. We both won.
The association, as I mentioned at that meeting, was a “front” for the proposed journal. I had been soliciting and receiving contributions from 2017 onward. A good chunk of the journal was good to go. Its publication was supposed to mark the hundredth anniversary of Montague Summers’s seminal The Vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928). I even presented a dummy cover of the intended journal, mostly compromised of Monty’s studio portrait. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it finished on time.
Several false starts followed before, at long last, the first issue of the Journal of Vampire Studies was published on December 17, 2020 (without Monty on the cover). The person who’d been accompanying me on that journey, reviewing submissions—and determining which ones made the cut—was my mate (and Assistant Editor), Andy.
It was his experience reviewing material and fast turnaround that made him a natural choice for the gig. His turnaround’s still remarkable. Andy’s even written several reviews for the journal. Two appear in our latest volume.[4] I can always count on him to deliver his inciteful takes on the books he reviews and the submissions we receive. That’s why he’s still my Assistant Editor. I couldn’t ask for a better colleague and his readers are definitely in good hands. So, here’s to you Andy, and another ten years!
Copies of the journal are available through various online retailers including Amazon, Waterstones and Blackwell’s. For more information on the association, visit here.
Notes
[1] Anthony Hogg, “Ten Years of TMtV: Guest Blog: A Scholar and a Gentleman—My Mate, Andy,” Taliesin Meets the Vampires (blog), March 2, 2016, https://taliesinttlg.blogspot.com/2016/03/ten-years-of-tmtv-guest-blog-scholar.html.
[2] The closest contemporary examples were the Canadian chapter of the Transylvania Society of Dracula’s Journal of Dracula Studies (the society became the North American chapter, then the central one); Slayage, published by the Whedon Studies Association (now the Association for the Study of Buffy+); or Cercle V’s L’Upir. Only the latter is no longer published.
[3] For more information on the event, see Anthony Hogg, “Vampire Studies Symposium 2015: The ‘Lost’ Footage,” The Vampirologist (blog), December 8, 2017, https://thevampirologist.wordpress.com/2017/12/08/vampire-studies-symposium-2015-the-lost-footage/.
[4] Andrew M. Boylan, review of The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Nick Groom and William Hughes, Journal of Vampire Studies 5 (2025): 104–11; review of Unlocking Dracula A.D. 1972: A Classic Horror Film in Context, by David Huckvale, 112– 13.
Bio: Anthony Hogg is the president of the Vampire Studies Association and editor of the Journal of Vampire Studies. He lives in Melbourne.
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