Coming from Walker and Bloomsbury in June 2010.

“I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.”

Jonathan Harker, who makes this confession in Dracula, wasn’t the first or last person to be drawn toward the dark allure of the undead. Before the bestsellers and blockbuster movies—before Twilight and True Blood, Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi—vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when writers all over Europe indulged their bloodthirsty imagination, culminating in Bram Stoker’s legendary 1897 novel Dracula.

Acclaimed nonfiction author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the nineteenth century—eerie tales of vampire lovers and strangers, children and parents and even grandparents; of ancient and young and invisible vampires. Sims gathers tales from England, America, France, Germany, and Russia, forming a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. In his surprising introduction, Sims asks, Why did so many people believe that vampires were real? What natural circumstances did they misinterpret into supernatural narratives? He explores the natural history of vampires, the real-death circumstances that led people to believe that the deceased were leaving their coffins at night and preying upon the living.

Beginning even earlier, with allegedly eyewitness accounts from eighteenth-century eastern Europe, Dracula’s Guest provides a thrilling roller-coaster ride of great writing, while also demonstrating how Romantic and Victorian writers refined the raw ore of peasant superstition into a whole vampire mythology of aristocratic decadence and innocence betrayed that continues to haunt us. Even in the twenty-first century, the undead still walk among us.