The versatility of vampires

VAMPIRES. They just won't lie down, will they? On the contrary, of all the fevered imaginings which have haunted the pages of fiction over the past two hundred years, vampires have proved to be among the most versatile. They can slip through keyholes and melt into walls, they can change at will into bats or wolves or enveloping mists; you can dress them up or down for almost any occasion and they age gracefully except, of course, if they're exposed to sunlight, when they promptly shrivel to a gratifyingly Biblical pile of dust.

But where did it come from, this extraordinarily potent image of a creature which lives on human blood? During the course of his research for this glorious collection of vampire fiction, Peter Raining has unearthed some fascinating vampire facts. First, if you thought vampires always hail from Transylvania, think again; the great explorer Sir Richard Burton produced a collection of stories from India entitled Vikram the Vampire in 1893, while a 1913 translation of a Chinese book called Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures indicates that vampires wandered through night-time China, too.

And if you thought Count Dracula was the origin of his species, try Elizabeth Grey's The Skeleton Count Or, The Vampire Mistress, serialised in a London penny dreadful called The Casket in the autumn of 1828, almost 70 years before the appearance of Stoker's novel. Or what about Varney the Vampyre, whose tale begins in the time of Oliver Cromwell and incorporates elements we would now place firmly in the bracket of spy fiction? Or even The Grave of Ethelind Tionguala, an 1887 story of vampirism in Co Cork?

As for the idea that vampires always take the form of urbane aristocrats who emerge from their castles at sunset in search of sustenance from freshly-squeezed virgins, well, prepare to have another illusion shattered. In Morley Robert's The Blood Fetish, it is a severed hand which is up to no bloody good, while in The Land of the Time-Leeches, Gustav Meyrink speculates on the existence of a parallel universe in which monstrous doubles live lives of indolence and suck away our energy while we sleep peacefully in our beds without suspecting a thing.

Having set out, according to his introduction, to put Bram Stoker and his cadaverous count in their place by recording the existence of Dracula's successors and predecessors, Raining achieves almost precisely the opposite. Dracula may not have been the first fictional vampire but he is, on the evidence of this collection, still the leader of the vampire pack. No other vampiric creation apart, perhaps, from Anne Rice's charismatic young newcomer, Lest at, he of Interview with the Vampire and its plethora of sequels can rival him for longevity and adaptability. He has even been remodelled in the image of our post modern age, notably by Woody Allen in Count Dracula, which sees a harassed, panicky vampire trapped in a neighbour's cupboard when he sallies forth by mistake during a solar eclipse, and by William F. Nolan in Getting Dead, where suicide, despite the protagonist's best despairing efforts, just won't work - "Helsinki: stake through his shoulder. London: stake through his upper thigh. Dusseldorf: stake through his left foot (he limped for six months).

This fondness for sending itself up is one of the most appealing aspects of the vampire genre; but there are plenty of shivers to be had too, and Raining has unearthed pieces of impressively varying mood and tone by such as Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Bela Lugosi and Lord Byron (well, it might be by Lord Byron) as well as The Destruction of Castle Dracula, a chapter the publishers of Stoker's Dracula decided to omit but which Raining tracked down in a copy of the original manuscript in the Rosenbach Library in the US.

The introductory notes with which he prefaces each story are a masterful combination of erudition and entertainment, and the prose of the stories themselves ranges from purplest gothic - "eagerly has thou striven to match thyself with me, and ill hast thou done this night" - to wry contemporary - "he could only smell mustard from the hot dog he'd eaten during the last show, an aroma strong enough to overpower blood's subtle aroma". Yep; plenty to get your teeth into, folks, in this meaty history of the undead.