Vampire Books Online / Vampire in Literature - The Birmingham age-herald (Birmingham, Ala.), May 30, 1913

From the Kansas City Times.

THE vampire idea is one that doesn't fit well in the Anglo-Saxon brainpan. Vampirism is a Slavic creation. It is love after death. A dead woman with no heart and ice water flowing in her veins loves a man in the warm flesh. She turns his head with phantasmagoria of love and passion. While he is asleep, she opens his veins and drinks his blood. This idea is horrible. Yet many poets have written romances on this theme. Goethe, the German poet, used the vampire legend in his "Bride of Corinth". It shocked the German critics and they accused him of bad taste in introducing this Slavic idea into a purely Greek story.

Our own Poe, who dealt mainly in the grotesque and the horrible and wrote much of love after death, could never quite "go" the vampire idea. One should think that Poe would have reveled in such a theme. But his chiefest work on the subject of death divided lovers is "The Raven," and in that song the dead girl does not return to drain the life fluid of her lover. The raven perched above the chamber door is not a vampire, and Lenore, that radiant maiden, he shall clasp her "nevermore."

If the reader wishes to find a man who fills his stories with red lipped vampires, let him turn to the works of Theophile Gautier, the French romanticist. In his story, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," the author pictures the voluptuous queen as the vampire of the Nile, flitting in a land of tombs.

In another of Gautier's stories, a young Englishman visiting the ruins of Pompeii falls in love with the form of a beautiful woman whose imprint left in a chunk of lava where her body was consumed ages ago. The man lingers long after nightfall in the Street of Abundance and then falls under a spell. He is transported back to the days before the eruption, when Pompeii was a thriving metropolis. There he meets the beautiful lady, Arria Marcella, whose imprinted bust preserved in lava had so charmed him. Her figure is really as beautiful as he had been led to suspect from the mold of it the cinders had saved like a petrified footprint in rock.

Arria is a vampire. She tells the young youth that his love has recreated her and her city. She invites him to a banquet and he partakes with eagerness. Now when he falls asleep, Arria will open his vein in his arm. But luckily, help is at hand to save our hero from the common fate of those who dally with vampires. A priest of the new religion that has just reached Pompeii, called Christianity, makes his entry. The good man exclaims: "Stop, Arria, infamous daughter of paganism! Was not a life of misconduct enough for you? Can you not leave the living in their sphere? Have not your ashes cooled yet since the day when you perished unrepentant beneath the rain of volcanic fire? So then, even 2000 years have not sufficed to calm your amorous heart, and your voracious arms still draw to your deadly breast of marble the poor mad man whom your philters have intoxicated!"

The vampire pleads with the holy father for one more hour of delirious life. But the early Christian is not to be moved. He pronounced a formula of exorcism which banished from Arria's cheeks the rosy tints that had suffused them. At that moment rang out the first peal of the angelus.

A sob of agony broke from the lips of the young woman at the sound. Her outstretched arms collapsed. The draperies that covered her sank fold on fold as though the contours that had sustained them had suddenly given way. The wretched night walker beheld on the banquet couch beside him only a handful of cinders mingled with a few fragments of calcined bones, among which gold bracelets and jewelry glittered, together with such other shapeless remains as were found in excavating the villa of Arrius Diomedes, father of Arria Marcella.

And that's what happens to a vampire when you call the turn just in time.