Halloween is three weeks off, so here's the Journal's scariest review. Michael Dirda reads Vampire Tales, edited by Nick Groom (Oxford, 688 pages, $21.99). Every piece in it was published before 1897, the year Bram Stoker's Dracula appeared. The surprise is how early the money shows up. The first vampire story from the Americas dates from 1819. It ends on a complaint about people who bleed honest men dry and then walk free under an insolvency law, the kind that lets a debtor off.
The book opens with five works from 1819, the reviewer writes. One is a fragment by Byron. Another is The Vampyre by John William Polidori, who had been Byron's doctor and modeled his smooth Lord Ruthven on the poet. Byron's reaction, as the review relays it, was “what do I know of vampires?” Thanks to Polidori, the reviewer says, vampires have had Byron's glamour ever since, on stage, on film and in print.
The same year brought The Black Vampyre by Uriah Derick D'Arcy, set in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The reviewer calls it a miniature Gothic fantasy. It closes with a section the author headed Moral. The land of liberty, it says, swarms with vampires who have “sucked the whole substance of an hundred honest men.” They then escape punishment through “the potent magic of an insolvent law.” Scholars have long read the vampire and its victim as the boss and the worker, the reviewer notes. Two later stories tie blood to money directly, Good Lady Ducayne from 1896 and Margery of Quether from 1884.
Three cents a page
The rest is a tour. Carmilla from 1871-72, Maupassant's The Horla from 1887, Poe's Ligeia from 1838, Stevenson's Olalla from 1885, and extracts from Varney the Vampire, the long penny serial (1845–47). The pictured cover of its first number shows the price, one penny, with the next three numbers thrown in free. The reviewer calls the whole thing an excellent anthology. Its glory, he says, is the reading aids. There's a long introduction, a bibliography, a chronology up to 1897 and endnotes on every story. At least a quarter of the book is scholarship. At $21.99 for 688 pages, that's about three cents a page.
Our read
This is Insurance and Consumer Protection (M11), the Halloween edition. The image of money drained quietly, a little at a time, is more than two centuries old. The 1819 author aimed it at debtors who never paid. The modern versions are duller and just as hungry. A subscription nobody remembers signing up for. A fee buried in a fund's fine print. A loan to a relative that was never going to come back. A caller with a story and a deadline. None of them bite. They sip.
So once a year, pull the statements and look for the small, regular outflows you can't name. Cancel what you don't use. Ask what each fund costs. Write down who owes you what, and decide whether it's a loan or a gift. The garlic in this story is a quiet hour with the statements, and it works best before anything starts to look pale.