Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Everything Old Is New Again

Andrew recently wrote a review for Weird Vampire Tales (1992) after I recommended it to him, a little while ago.

It seems he enjoyed the anthology of pulp fiction vampire stories as much as I did.

However, his description of the stories all being taken from Weird Tales is slightly inaccurate: most of them were. But not all. This site shows which story came from which magazine.

Andrew's review also notes a couple of (now) standard vampire tropes, which may originally have been published in the pulps. For example:
In a visual medium, as far as I know, it was Dan Curtis who brought the concept of the reincarnated love into the vampire genre as a main theme in Dark Shadows. I, the Vampire by Henry Kutner is a much earlier written example of the concept being used – dating back to 1937.
And "William Tenn uses science, and a blood substitute, to enable vampires and humans to coexist, long before True Blood, in She Only Goes Out at Night."

4 comments:

Taliesin_ttlg said...

to assume, makes an ass of u and me!!! I have edited said article to indicate more than one source.

Anthony Hogg said...

I did notice that after I had written my blog entry. Heh heh.

Nonetheless I enjoyed your review and I'm glad you made note of certain tropes found rather profusely in modern day vampire fiction.

The authors of the pulps need more due recognition for their contribution to the genre, methinks and I commend you for doing so! :)

Taliesin_ttlg said...

Anthony - to clarify, the assumption was mine, in respect of the source of each story (I didn't always read the pre-story blurb) and the berating was for me! I edited after reasing this article

Anthony Hogg said...

Ah, sorry mate. Didn't know!

Either way, you do a bang-up job on your site.

But, it always pays to read the intros and such. For instance, if you've read F. Paul Wilson's Midnight Mass (2004), he admits that his better-known book, The Keep (1981), was actually a "pseudovampire" novel.

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