French Tales of Vampires (Volume 2)

The theme of the resurrection from the dead takes multiple aspects, that of ghosts, zombies and vampires, but nothing is more frightening and seductive as the latter. Whereas a ghost is nothing more than a dead person who persists in wanting to continue living, it is in a form that ranges from the ineffably ethereal to the grotesquely repulsive. The vampire, on the other hand, is an incarnated ghost, condemned to feed on the blood of the living, (or sometimes their psychic energy) to keep on living. The vampire is a dead person who refuses to be dead; he asserts that he is not dead, but "more-than-alive." In this thematic collection (the second of three), we have gathered three remarkable stories by Etienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, Paul Féval and Leon Gozlan, published between 1825 and 1862, that encapsulate the basic archetypes of the Vampire myth, in both its erotic and thanatological forms. Meet the seductive Alinska, the Virgion Vampire from Hungary, the terrifying Vampire from the Val-de-Grâce, and the legendary and mercurial knighshades Jran and Ange Tenebre. Is life after death a desirable dream or a loathsome abomination? And what price must be paid for it? Moral ambiguities abound in these stories which are but the mirror of our visions of the afterlife, and the embodiment of our choices.