Title Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood Series --- Author James Malcolm Rymer Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing 1845 Category Gothic horror Warnings None Main Characters Sir Francis Varney, the Bannerworths, Admiral Bell, and many many others Main Elements Vampires

After 100 years of neglect, the potboiler Penny Dreadful Varney The Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood returns in this innovative critical edition to entertain a whole new generation of readers. Sold for a penny a chapter on the streets of London in 1845, Varney the Vampire is a milestone of Vampire fiction, yet ignored and overlooked for nearly 100 years, until now!

This book can be downloaded for free (I don't recall where I got it, probably Project Gutenberg) but make sure you find all it! Often you'll stumble across just the first part. So if it doesn't end with Varney, well, ending, then you're missing some of the book.

Alright, before starting this book there is something you need to pay attention to. This is a Penny Dreadful. This means the author got paid by chapter or word, so it was in his best interest to make the story last as long as he possibly could. Thus to a modern day reader this story is a kind of literary soap opera. You can read three or four chapters and the story won't really move forward. For example - some event occurs and is witnessed by Character 1. Character 1 runs off to find Character 2 to recount the tale. Just as he finishes Character 3 walks into the room and the whole thing needs to be repeated. At which point Character 3 exclaims that Character 4 absolutely must hear about all of this, and off we go again.

Or we have a scene where Character 1 is asked to wait in the library for Character 2. Getting a little bored, Character 1 picks up a book on the table and reads a story, which the reader is forced to indulge in as well. There are probably a dozen other little tricks to drag the story out, including the Admiral and Jack that spend half their time arguing with each other using nautical terms. So I can understand if people find it incredibly long and boring and stuffed full of filler. But there's a trick to reading it, read it like it was published. Don't sit down and try to get through half of it in one sitting. Since I had it on my eReader I would cover 10-20 pages a day, and not every day. Yes, this meant it took me a several months to get through it, but I also didn't go crazy.

After all, this book is very, very long. I thought it was long when I read through 1000 pages...and discovered it was only the first half! To preserve my sanity I read the second half the next year :)

As to the story itself, it's quite inconsistent. In the first half we have Sir Francis Varney trying to scare the Bannerworths out of their home so he can retrieve something the Bannerworth patriarch hid within it's walls before he passed away. Is Varney really a vampire or just a con man? We're never quite sure. He doesn't turn into a bat, and doesn't seem to actually drink blood.

Then, after that story line more or less wraps up, we start a series of attempts of Varney to get married, apparently he does need to drink blood now, but somehow or other he is foiled in each and every attempt to mary a sweet virgin to sustain his thirst. This gets a bit repetitive but also kind of amusing. But you can tell the author is getting kind of bored of things and they start speeding up.

Finally we get to the end, where Varney goes back to describe his beginning, which doesn't seem to match much with what we know about Varney from the first half of the story. He's got powers and limitations that didn't seem to exist before, but he is most definitely a vampire at this point, dying and reviving multiple times.

I'm not sure how I managed to get through it. Partly I just accepted it for what it was. Also, instead of being annoyed at the author's attempts to drag the story out as long as he could, I was assumed by it, and tried to see in how many different ways he was achieving it. I found myself liking Sir Francis, though he swings randomly from a cold-blooded killer to sympathetic character and back again depending on the mood of the author that chapter. Unfortunately some storylines don't get wrapped up (we leave the Bannerworths still trying to reclaim an ancestral home without any hint of whether they succeeded or not). But overall, I'm happy I read it and feel like I must have actually accomplished something rare to have read through the whole crazy thing, though I doubt I'll ever attempt to read it again! And keep in mind, this is one of vampire literature's early classics and shouldn't be ignored. Varney is probably more like our modern Lestat than Dracula, a vampire that feels guilt for the death he causes but at the same sees no other way to be what he must be (Dracula of course being a purely evil).