Penguin Classics has long been the go-to imprint for important Victorian fiction and I'm very glad to see them put a focus on the darker side of that with Speculative Fiction Specials. I'm also very glad they sent me a few of their initial titles. This is one of them, a double feature of pivotal 19th century vampire tales: a short story by the British physician John Polidori, written in 1819 and so pre-Victorian, and a novella or short novel by Irish author Sheridan le Fanu, published much later in 1872, so very much Victorian. The combination is a revealing one, in a number of ways.

'The Vampyre', for all that it's one of the earliest and most influential looks at vampires in fiction, doesn't feel much like a vampire story at all. None of the traditional trappings we've got used to over a century and a half, are present, down to the consumption of blood. The vampire here, Lord Ruthven—which I'm shocked to discover is pronounced Riven—is an energy vampire, who extracts life essence from its victims in the form of their souls rather than their blood. He's more akin to a character like Colin in 'What We Do in the Shadows' than any of his peers, even though he's noble in outlook and sophisticated in company.

By comparison, 'Carmilla' feels entirely like the sort of vampire story we expect. All the trappings missing from 'The Vampyre' are here in swathes. The setting is gothic, in mansions and castles, all on the continent. The vampire comes as if in dream, bleeding its victim without resistance. And, in case we hadn't figured out that Carmilla is a vampire, a picturer restorer returns art cleaned and restored and there's her spitting image in Mircalla Karnstein, painted in 1698. The anagram isn't hard to figure out, especially when Millarca shows up in stories too. There's a sexual element and one of female empowerment. And, of course, it's all explained through superstition.

In other words, 'The Vampyre' reads like something decadent and romantic that Lord Byron might have conjured up, which is fair given that he did, while 'Carmilla' reads more like the novelisation of a Hammer horror movie. Of course, it became a few of them. And I realise I probably ought to back those statements up with details.

John Polidori became Byron's personal physician in 1816 and so travelled with him across Europe. That summer, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, they indulged in a competition of sorts with guests, Mary Godwin and her husband, Percy Shelley, "a ghost story". Godwin's was the most successful, published under her married name as 'Frankenstein', but they all wrote and Byron's contribution was 'A Fragment', an abandoned piece that Polidori took and ran with, with the result being 'The Vampyre'. He was keen to give credit to Byron but his publisher took that to warrant the byline of 'A Tale by Lord Byron', which is only true in the strictest of senses.

While 'Carmilla' was loosely adapted to film in 1932 as 'Vampyr' and 1936 as 'Dracula's Daughter', it wasn't until the sixties that the sexual undertones were viable and they were promptly milked, as it were, in various European cinemas. In France, Roger Vadim turned it into 'Blood and Roses'; in Italy, Camille Mastrocinque turned it into 'Terror in the Crypt' or 'Crypt of the Vampire'; in the UK, Hammer spun up the 'Karnstein' trilogy by turning it into 'The Vampire Lovers'; and, in Spain, Vicente Aranda turned it into 'The Blood Spattered Bride'.

The other way in which these two pieces are thoroughly different is in their use of language. 'The Vampyre' feels old, rather like the stereotype of Victorian fiction proffered by those who hate it with a passion. Of course, it would be poorly assigned, because 1819 predates Queen Victoria by a full decade and most of another. The actual Victorian fiction here, 'Carmilla', feels a little dated by today's standards but entirely readable. I'd have lapped it up as a teenager and may well have done. It's so archetypal that I know the story better from other sources, but I certainly owned at least one copy back then and I'm pretty sure I read it, too.

The only reason I hesitate to claim that for sure is that there are a couple of variances from what we've come to take as the norm for vampire stories and they aren't familiar. One is that Carmilla is able to enter her grave in supernatural fashion without disturbing either architecture or soil. We're used to vampires sleeping in graves, coffins or just under dirt but they usually have to open or dig them first. That's not needed here. The other is that the vampire origin story is suicide. If you take your own life, that affects where you go next in many religions and cultures, but I hadn't realised that one of them was right back here forever as the undead.

This Penguin edition digs deep from a scholarly perspective and I learned more from the various additional features than just how to correctly pronounce Lord Ruthven. The foreword, by author V. E. Schwab, who wrote a queer vampire story of her own in 'First Kill', which became a Netflix TV show, doesn't add that much, but the substantial introduction by Nick Groom does, especially in a historical sense, though it might be more scholarly than many readers prefer. There are copious footnotes, some of which aren't obvious to anyone with a basic grounding in pop culture, and the reading list is strong. There's even a second introduction to 'The Vampyre' but that's taken from the original first edition. Penguin didn't skimp on extras.

I've been meaning to dive back into the pioneering classics of the genre for a while now and these are two pivotal texts that underpin the vampire genre. 'Dracula' came a quarter of a century on from 'Carmilla' and Penguin have reprinted that too for me to dive into. However, the other title in their initial list that they sent me is 'The Gilda Stories' by Jewelle Gomez. It isn't a classic from the perspective of time, having been first published in 1991 as a debut novel, but it won a string of awards and, just this month, it was mentioned in 'Positive Obsession', a cultural biography of the pioneering writer Octavia E. Butler. I'm looking forward to both. ~~ Hal C F Astell