Penguin Speculative Fiction Special – serie

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, now as a new Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction SpecialA Penguin Classic HardcoverFirst published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez’s classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly succumbs to a mysterious, wasting illness, her blood drained away; and the lunatic Renfield raves about the imminent arrival of his 'master'. In the ensuing battle of wills between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries – led by the intrepid vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing – Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.A Penguin Classics hardback edition, with a Foreword by Robert Eggers and an Introduction by Karen Winstead.

The first vampire short story in English, The Vampyre by John Polidori, and the first vampire novella, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, are published together in one hardback volume. The Vampyre (1819) features Lord Ruthven, a deathly pale yet fatally charismatic nobleman who preys on women of high society. It is generally considered as the first fully developed vampire narrative in English literature. Carmilla (1871–2) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is a nineteenth-century Gothic novella featuring a protagonist who typifies the long line of female and lesbian vampires in literature, movies, television series and artwork. In a castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura, a young woman, leads an isolated life with her father. A horse-drawn carriage crashes and an unexpected guest, the mysterious and seductive Carmilla, enters their lives.