George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962)

I’ve been over the vampire thing for a bit but every once in awhile an old school one finds me and I can’t help but read it. While looking on the Gutenberg Project for some horror recently, I found this one. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like a Victorian, Gothic, psychic vampire.

Reginald Clarke is a man everyone loves. He’s talented in every way and people crave his company. Artists flock to him and he takes in writers, musicians, and painters to his home. But something happens show more to all these talented people --- they soon leave him with nothing, not a trace of the talent they arrived with. A young writer staying with Reginald, and for all purposes,
under his spell, figures it out and tries to get out from under Reginald’s enchantment.

The House of the Vampire is good and creepy and the type of vampire story I want more of. There’s no blood and certainly no sparkling going on here. Let’s all take a moment to be thankful for that. It’s an interesting concept, a psychic vampire, and frankly one that’s more terrifying, in some ways, than an actual blood sucking vampire. This is someone stealing who and what you are. Taking it for himself and using it to his advantage until there’s nothing left of you. You are a shell of a human being with nothing to give or take from anyone. Think about that.

If Wikipedia is correct, this short story was written in 1907 but it feels younger than its 100 + years. show less

Are you looking for a brief history of the last two thousand years in the form of an adventure novel of ideas featuring a bisexual Nietzschean superman who just happens to be at or near the center of all the greatest events? If so, this is that book. The extended Gilles de Retz sequence was especially gripping.

One of the first psychic vampire novels of its time - where the vampire feeds off of more than just blood - The House of the Vampire is an early classic in its genre. Republished in this new edition, this Victorian novel operates in the continuum of life and death. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. Energetically inventive and infused with a relish for the supernatural, especially the trappings of the dark, The House of the Vampire delivers a horror which we know show more does not - but none the less conceivably might - exist and threaten ourselves. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, The House of the Vampire is considered a classic among Victorian Gothic stories. He felt the presence of the hand of Reginald Clarke - unmistakably - groping in his brain as if searching for something that had still escaped him. He tried to move, to cry out, but his limbs were paralysed. When, by a superhuman effort, he at last succeeded in shaking off the numbness that held him enchained, he awoke just in time to see a figure, that of a man, disappearing in the wall that separated Reginald's apartments from his room....

http://www.bauuinstitute.com/Publishing/HouseOfTheVampire.html show less

I listened to this once before, thought it was alright, but listened to it again and enjoyed it much better the second time around. I loved the setting mostly.