Varney, the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood

The Book that Inspired Dracula! This masterpiece of 1840s melodramatic penny-dreadful grim and grue has thrilled and delighted generations. Long before Dracula, Varney was shocking Victorian sensibilities and senses, sending palpitations of the heart throughout the British Isles. Serialized in the weekly papers, Varney proved an endlessly fertile and inventive tale whose opening pages clearly inspired the opening shots of F. W. Murnau's great vampire classic of the German silent cinema, Nosferatu. In its fecundity of devices and incident, Varney finally weighed in at 2000 pages when it was published in book form and prefigured almost every ideal that would emerge over the century and a half in the literature of the undead. Here's a sample of Varney's dizzyingly rich prose: "A tall figure is standing on the ledge immediately outside the long window. A small pane of glass is broken, and the form from without introduces a long gaunt hand, which seems utterly destitute of flesh. The figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face. It is perfectly white?perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth?the fearful looking teeth?projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. It approaches the bed with a strange, gliding movement. It clashes together the long nails that literally appear to hang from the finger ends. No sound comes from its lips." It's a not to be missed vampiric feast. Read it all now complete and unabridged in one giant eBook!