What do you think?
Rate this book
Varney the Vampire
Varney the Vampire (1847) is a penny dreadful novel by British writers James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. Originally serialized in cheap volumes, the novel introduced some of the most recognizable tropes of vampire fiction still used today, including the depiction of fangs and the use of a Gothic setting. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Varney the Vampire is a story of tragedy, damnation, and revenge that pioneered many of the themes common to horror and pulp fiction today. Sir Francis Varney was condemned to an eternity of vampiric life following his actions during the reign of Oliver Cromwell. Having betrayed a royalist and killed his own son in a fit of rage, Varney was forced to suffer death and resurrection countless times over on his insatiable quest for human blood. In the nineteenth century, he targets the Bannerworths, a once-noble family fallen on hard times in their crumbling estate. Gruesome and tragic, the story manages to humanize the vampire without softening his terrifying actions or features, laying the groundwork for an action-packed romp through such legendary cities as London, Naples, and Venice. Varney the Vampire is a grisly penny dreadful novel, a quick-witted work of horror that has inspired generations of storytellers and readers alike. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest is a classic of British horror fiction reimagined for modern readers.
864 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1845
262 people are currently reading
5196 people want to read
About the author
James Malcolm Rymer
205 books31 followersJames Malcolm Rymer was a British nineteenth century writer of penny dreadfuls, and is the probable author of Varney the Vampire, often attributed to fellow writer Thomas Peckett Prest, and co-author (with Prest) of The String of Pearls, in which the notorious villain Sweeney Todd makes his literary debut.
Information about Rymer is sketchy. In the London Directory for 1841 he is listed as a civil engineer, living at 42 Burton Street, and the British Museum catalogue mentions him in 1842 as editing the Queen's Magazine. Between 1842 to the 1867 he wrote up to 115 popular novels for the English bookseller and publisher, Edward Lloyd, including the best-sellers Ada the Betrayed, Varney the Vampyre and The String of Pearls. Rymer's novels appeared in England under his own name as well as anagrammatic pseudonyms such as Malcolm J. Errym and Malcolm J. Merry.
He died on 11 August 1884 and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery, west London.
Information about Rymer is sketchy. In the London Directory for 1841 he is listed as a civil engineer, living at 42 Burton Street, and the British Museum catalogue mentions him in 1842 as editing the Queen's Magazine. Between 1842 to the 1867 he wrote up to 115 popular novels for the English bookseller and publisher, Edward Lloyd, including the best-sellers Ada the Betrayed, Varney the Vampyre and The String of Pearls. Rymer's novels appeared in England under his own name as well as anagrammatic pseudonyms such as Malcolm J. Errym and Malcolm J. Merry.
He died on 11 August 1884 and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery, west London.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
July 26, 2012
God my brain. If you read this in the right mood it can be hilarious, but this is one hell of a slog for something that bears little resemblance to modern vampires and doesn't have plot holes, it has plot subways. I'm not even going to try to synopsize this, but just list the characters.
Flora Bannerworth: The chick. Varney wants to suck her blood, then softens to her, and just wants her out of the way so he can get into Bannerworth Hall. Is engaged to Charles Holland and her brother is Henry.
She has the personality of a block of wood. Is just there to be menaced and fought over. She shoots Varney once or twice.
Henry Bannerworth: Head of Bannerworth estate, rather sickly. Wants to kick Varney's ass, generally fails in doing so. In a hilarious scene, he calls Varney a vampire to his face, and is made to look like an idiot despite it being true. Also has the personality of a block of wood. It must run in the family. He also shoots Varney, during a duel.
Mr Marchdale: Family friend of the Bannerworths. Is surprisingly kick-ass. Crack shot, who shoots Varney multiple times, once being a hilarious snipe at range when Varney is recovering from being shot from the last evening. Likes Flora, thinks Charles sucks. Is possibly right about that.
Charles Holland: Flora's fiance. Is upstaged by everyone else. Thinks the best way to deal with a vampire is to meet him by himself at midnight in order to duel him, despite knowing that Varney can kick everyone's ass usually. Has the personality of a block of wood, but this one is varnished. I forget if he shoots Varney.
Admiral Bell: Aka the A______l. Likes to say D_____d and D___ a lot. He's Charles's uncle, who gets drawn in when Marchdale tries to get him to drive Charles away by telling him Charles is going to marry a vampire's victim. Bell is too stupid for this plan to work.
Bell is...well. He's this pompous caricature of an admiral who brings life to the book only because he takes no nonsense from anyone save Jack Pringle, his sort of butler/seaman past crewmate. Starts out hilarious, gets annoying fast. He also shoots Varney, or tries to. Varney insulting him and manipulating him is the highlight of the book. Jack Pringle telling him repeatedly to go to hell is the second.
Jack Pringle: Imagine Sam Weller from the Pickwick papers, and this is him. He and Bell have this weird bromance going on, where they insult each other horribly but can't live without each other. Manages to mangle the word Vampyre into Wamphighter on a frequent basis. He doesn't shoot Varney, I think, but mostly because he gets drunk or runs away when important things happen.
He actually has a personality because he knows Bell and keeps bringing up the past, and feels more like a real character. The naval banter between the two is well done, and though it too gets tiring, it can pick the book up sometimes.
Dr. Chillingworth: He is not a character, he is more a role and a plot point. His role is to be an absurd skeptic of vampyres. Then he just shows up when things happen.
The Mob. They count as a character in composite, and are actually pretty decent characters in singular too. All I have to say is dear God, do not piss off an English mob. The cliche of a horror book mob is that they are ineffectual and often comic relief, but this mob is real, legitimately dangerous, and even a little chilling. Here's some of what they do:
-burn down Varney's house.
-burn down the Bannerworth estate.
-kill an innocent man(!) who was just in the wrong place. It's actually horrific, because the guy tries to flee and fight, and is just borne down by numbers and killed.
-use actual tactics (!) like dispersing so soldiers can't get them and reforming elsewhere, rushing all the entrances to Varney's manor at once, and show an incredible amount of strength and courage.
-chase the hell out of Varney and actually bring him to heel a few times.
This is how bad they are: the heroes actually help Varney to escape the mob a few times. The mob doesn't shoot Varney, but they beat the crap out of him, and throw bricks at him.
Varney the Vampire: He's the only reason to read this. In his own way he's superior to Dracula. While Dracula only shows an animal cunning, Varney is an educated nobleman who has a razor-sharp wit and a nobless oblige nature. He's tall, and a little terrifying yet vulnerable: Varney can be revived from death if moonbeams touch him, but he can be fought and hurt by normal means. His first appearance is frightening, but sadly he devolves as a character as they try to explain him away.
He manages to dominate any scene he is in, and you sympathize more with him than the heroes. He tries to use terror and guile first, and violence last, although he is very effective at the latter too. If this book was the length of Dracula and better edited, he would be an interesting character. Sadly though, the plot drags him down, too. He gets shot, a LOT.
***
The Plot:
There isn't one.
Or rather that it changes or gets distracted so often that it doesn't matter. As soon as the admiral is announced, it all gets shot to hell as the author throws everything including the kitchen sink in there: miniature stories just told by the characters to take up space, focusing on peripheral people like the mob (which works hilariously well, surprisingly-the mob takes no crap and likes to heckle people) or an unnamed vampyre who just shows up asking for Varney and just gets dispatched by some herdsman without ever seeing him. This book is the length of ten novels, and the author frantically crams things in day to day it seems.
***
The Writing: It can work, but not usually. Dialogue is great, and sometimes he can evoke real emotion, but just sparingly.
The Verdict:Yeah, don't bother.
This book demands to be abridged. This is probably the only book that would lose nothing and gain by doing so. It's a tremendously long read that you will skim by the end, and not pleasurable enough to do so. It doesn't evoke horror much at all, and goes all over the place with mostly bland characters and no idea of a plot except what it can stuff in there continuity be damned.
There is some fun to be had in reading this. Everyone in one breath dreads Varney, and in the next are trying to murder him in the face with everything. Varney insults the hell out of people and fights often heroically against insurmountable odds. The admiral and Jack either need to get married or fight at paces with pistols. It's very mockable, and at times it can be entertaining. But good lord, there is so much padding and crap that all the good moments get drowned out by the sheer length of the book.
Even for its historical value, it isn't worth the slog. If you read it, it's a good book to make you fall asleep by. You'll never, ever get to the end in one sitting, and it can be pretty good in random chapters. But you are't missing a thing by skipping this, even if you like vampires so much you own vampire underwear. Or are a vampire.
Flora Bannerworth: The chick. Varney wants to suck her blood, then softens to her, and just wants her out of the way so he can get into Bannerworth Hall. Is engaged to Charles Holland and her brother is Henry.
She has the personality of a block of wood. Is just there to be menaced and fought over. She shoots Varney once or twice.
Henry Bannerworth: Head of Bannerworth estate, rather sickly. Wants to kick Varney's ass, generally fails in doing so. In a hilarious scene, he calls Varney a vampire to his face, and is made to look like an idiot despite it being true. Also has the personality of a block of wood. It must run in the family. He also shoots Varney, during a duel.
Mr Marchdale: Family friend of the Bannerworths. Is surprisingly kick-ass. Crack shot, who shoots Varney multiple times, once being a hilarious snipe at range when Varney is recovering from being shot from the last evening. Likes Flora, thinks Charles sucks. Is possibly right about that.
Charles Holland: Flora's fiance. Is upstaged by everyone else. Thinks the best way to deal with a vampire is to meet him by himself at midnight in order to duel him, despite knowing that Varney can kick everyone's ass usually. Has the personality of a block of wood, but this one is varnished. I forget if he shoots Varney.
Admiral Bell: Aka the A______l. Likes to say D_____d and D___ a lot. He's Charles's uncle, who gets drawn in when Marchdale tries to get him to drive Charles away by telling him Charles is going to marry a vampire's victim. Bell is too stupid for this plan to work.
Bell is...well. He's this pompous caricature of an admiral who brings life to the book only because he takes no nonsense from anyone save Jack Pringle, his sort of butler/seaman past crewmate. Starts out hilarious, gets annoying fast. He also shoots Varney, or tries to. Varney insulting him and manipulating him is the highlight of the book. Jack Pringle telling him repeatedly to go to hell is the second.
Jack Pringle: Imagine Sam Weller from the Pickwick papers, and this is him. He and Bell have this weird bromance going on, where they insult each other horribly but can't live without each other. Manages to mangle the word Vampyre into Wamphighter on a frequent basis. He doesn't shoot Varney, I think, but mostly because he gets drunk or runs away when important things happen.
He actually has a personality because he knows Bell and keeps bringing up the past, and feels more like a real character. The naval banter between the two is well done, and though it too gets tiring, it can pick the book up sometimes.
Dr. Chillingworth: He is not a character, he is more a role and a plot point. His role is to be an absurd skeptic of vampyres. Then he just shows up when things happen.
The Mob. They count as a character in composite, and are actually pretty decent characters in singular too. All I have to say is dear God, do not piss off an English mob. The cliche of a horror book mob is that they are ineffectual and often comic relief, but this mob is real, legitimately dangerous, and even a little chilling. Here's some of what they do:
-burn down Varney's house.
-burn down the Bannerworth estate.
-kill an innocent man(!) who was just in the wrong place. It's actually horrific, because the guy tries to flee and fight, and is just borne down by numbers and killed.
-use actual tactics (!) like dispersing so soldiers can't get them and reforming elsewhere, rushing all the entrances to Varney's manor at once, and show an incredible amount of strength and courage.
-chase the hell out of Varney and actually bring him to heel a few times.
This is how bad they are: the heroes actually help Varney to escape the mob a few times. The mob doesn't shoot Varney, but they beat the crap out of him, and throw bricks at him.
Varney the Vampire: He's the only reason to read this. In his own way he's superior to Dracula. While Dracula only shows an animal cunning, Varney is an educated nobleman who has a razor-sharp wit and a nobless oblige nature. He's tall, and a little terrifying yet vulnerable: Varney can be revived from death if moonbeams touch him, but he can be fought and hurt by normal means. His first appearance is frightening, but sadly he devolves as a character as they try to explain him away.
He manages to dominate any scene he is in, and you sympathize more with him than the heroes. He tries to use terror and guile first, and violence last, although he is very effective at the latter too. If this book was the length of Dracula and better edited, he would be an interesting character. Sadly though, the plot drags him down, too. He gets shot, a LOT.
***
The Plot:
There isn't one.
Or rather that it changes or gets distracted so often that it doesn't matter. As soon as the admiral is announced, it all gets shot to hell as the author throws everything including the kitchen sink in there: miniature stories just told by the characters to take up space, focusing on peripheral people like the mob (which works hilariously well, surprisingly-the mob takes no crap and likes to heckle people) or an unnamed vampyre who just shows up asking for Varney and just gets dispatched by some herdsman without ever seeing him. This book is the length of ten novels, and the author frantically crams things in day to day it seems.
***
The Writing: It can work, but not usually. Dialogue is great, and sometimes he can evoke real emotion, but just sparingly.
The Verdict:Yeah, don't bother.
This book demands to be abridged. This is probably the only book that would lose nothing and gain by doing so. It's a tremendously long read that you will skim by the end, and not pleasurable enough to do so. It doesn't evoke horror much at all, and goes all over the place with mostly bland characters and no idea of a plot except what it can stuff in there continuity be damned.
There is some fun to be had in reading this. Everyone in one breath dreads Varney, and in the next are trying to murder him in the face with everything. Varney insults the hell out of people and fights often heroically against insurmountable odds. The admiral and Jack either need to get married or fight at paces with pistols. It's very mockable, and at times it can be entertaining. But good lord, there is so much padding and crap that all the good moments get drowned out by the sheer length of the book.
Even for its historical value, it isn't worth the slog. If you read it, it's a good book to make you fall asleep by. You'll never, ever get to the end in one sitting, and it can be pretty good in random chapters. But you are't missing a thing by skipping this, even if you like vampires so much you own vampire underwear. Or are a vampire.
April 17, 2022
Full title, according to the cover of the first issue of this penny dreadful novel:
“Varney, the Vampire
- or the Feast of Blood -
A Romance of Exciting Interest”
First of all, holy mother of long novels, this was LONG. I think it’s the longest published novel I’ve ever read.
When I decided I wanted to read it, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg version. Everybody’s seen Dickens novels, so I’ll just say it was 330,000 words long, which is slightly shorter than Bleak House, and vaguely longer than Our Mutual Friend.
Little did I know that the Gutenberg version isn’t complete – only about half of it is there, and the rest is hard to find on the internet (But not impossible).
“Varney” is actually longer than “War and Peace”, and considerably less action-packed.
Because it's relatively unknown and reading it in its entirety is a bit of a commitment, I'll write a longer review than usual, with a full summary of the book.
But first, what's it about, right?
"Varney, the Vampire" was published in 1845-1847. It was a penny dreadful, which means it came out in weekly installments, each costing a penny. There are no pretenses that this is high art - and even the authorship is debated.
"Varney" came before Dracula and before our concepts of what a vampire is solidified. He can walk in the sunlight, but moonlight really makes his vampiric nature shine. It revives him if he's died again, and it makes him stronger if he's weak. He can eat normal food, but it doesn't agree with him. If he dies, the entirety of nature conspires to bring him into the moonlight to revive him again. He can never get rest - for once, it's pretty clear why being an immortal vampire is a curse, not a blessing.
The book itself is strangely down-to-earth, especially in the first part. In fact, it often reads like the author himself couldn't decide whether Varney was a vampire or a scoundrel. In the first half of the novel, he has huge money issues and he does his best to get his hands on a fortune, the way a scoundrel would.
The main characters don't even know whether he's a vampire at all, or if it's a trick to swindle them - they eventually decide it's a trick. Later on, it's revealed that he was a vampire pretending to be a gentleman, pretending to be a vampire. I bet the author himself didn't know that to start with.
Varney is a very depressed, sad, gallant figure. He seems to want to get his way, but preferably without harming anyone - if he can frighten instead of harm, it's all for the good. (Except he does kill people in cold blood a few times)
This might sound cool, but it's very long and very uneven, with splatterings of purple prose and passages which seem to have been inserted for the word count.
And, since I promised a summary...
The first chapter is quite cool and gothic. Flora Bannerworth is asleep in her bed, when the dreaded vampire makes its way into her chamber and proceeds to suck her blood. She screams for help, and her two brothers, Henry and George Bannerworth, rush to her aid, along with their friend, Marchdale, who happens to be staying with them and their mother for awhile.
The attacker looks EXACTLY like the portrait of one of their ancestors, who's been dead a hundred years. If you remember this throughout the book, your memory is better than the author's. Varney gets a different origin story by the end.
In chapters 2-10, Henry, George, Marchdale and the local doctor go off to check the coffin of the Bannerworth ancestor who resembles the vampire. There's nobody there!
Meanwhile, the vampire shows up at the house, who's shot by Flora. After this deed of bravery, she turns around and swoons in the arms of her fiancee, Charles Holland, who happened to arrive from the continent precisely in time to make sure she doesn't get any bruises from collapsing on the floor. A true romantic hero!
In chapters 11-26, people fret. Francis Varney (rrooooolll credits), a neighbor of the Bannerworths, says he wants to buy their house, which is quickly losing value since it has a vampire attached. The fact that he looks precisely like that vampire is Highly Suspicious to everyone.
Charles Holland's uncle, admiral Bell, shows up along with his friend, the sailor Jack Pringle. They're a bit of comic relief and they speak in ocean-related terms a lot (it gets tiring, and then it starts being cute again).
There's a lot of fretting, but not much going on. The vampire keeps showing up, then running off. Sir Francis Varney is repeatedly challenged to about a million duels.
When the author forgets where he's going, he has a character read a story, and we read that story instead of the usual chapter.
In chapter 27, Charles Holland vanishes. We later find out he's been kidnapped by Varney and Marchdale, the friend of the Bannerworths who was staying with them, and trapped in some old ruins. He'll eventually be set free - and Marchdale will die a terrible death, squashed to death when the old ruins collapse over him. This happens in chapter... 75? Maybe?
Seriously, he's gone half the arc. And Marchdale would be a good Disney villain.
In chapters 28-39, we find out Varney owes people money. He later persuades Flora that he wants to suck her blood because he loves her - therefore, she should run far, far away. Because this isn't "Twilight", she thinks this is a very sensible idea, but the people around her want to catch the vampire, so she can't leave, either.
Varney actually fights a duel, but refuses to shoot at his opponent. He's such a gentleman.
The phrase "interview with the vampyre" shows up in chapter 36.
In chapters 40-89, we meet the most remarkable character in the book: the mob. (I'll capitalize it, because heck.) The Mob is truly frightening, and when it gets going, it stops at nothing. It's superstitious and it wants to kill the vampire.
But The Mob isn't a clever force. It's brutal and irrational. It digs up a corpse in the graveyard, it stakes the corpse of a stranger who happened to die at the inn, it burns down Varney's house, it burns down the ruins where Charles was entrapped and where Marchdale lies dead, it kills a stranger who arrived in the village to demand blackmail money from Varney and, finally, it chases Varney around with such criminal intent that Flora Bannerworth decides to help him out by hiding him in her bedroom.
You know, being brutally murdered by The Mob is too terrible a fate even for a vampire.
Somewhere around this time, Flora's second brother, George, is completely forgotten and left out of the story. I'd have mentioned how she does nearly nothing except be protected and talked to like a pre-feminism heroine, but to be honest, her brother vanishes out of the story. He was so useless I even forgot he existed before checking wiki. And everyone around her is so incompetent that Varney doesn't even need to try hard to escape them - his single real enemy is The Mob.
Somewhere in there, we find out that Chillingworth, the doctor who's a friend of the Bannerworths, attempted to revive a cadaver Frankenstein-style - and that cadaver was Varney. So that's an origin story (but, we later find out, not the real one). (Although, to be honest, I don't think the author remembered much of his own story by the end.)
Also, a Hungarian nobleman who doesn't drink... wine... shows up at the local inn (he specifically says this! A century before the movie!) He wants to meet Varney, but The Mob catches him and shoots him. He falls into a river, is revived by the moon, fished out by a fisherman, then tries to suck the blood out of the fisherman's daughter.
In chapters 90-92, Varney manages to get his hands on the treasure in Bannerworth house!
It turns out he used to be gambling buddies with the father of the Bannerworths. After he and daddy dearest lost a fortune, they killed the guy who won it from them, stole it, then the elder Bannerworth hid it in a portrait and killed himself. Yes. He hid the money and offed himself. Varney's life is basically one big bag of suck.
In chapters 93- 126, the Bannerworths become less important. Flora Bannerworth and Charles Holland get married. The admiral Bell has a bit of comic relief with a quaker.
What's more important is that Varney pretends to be a baronet from the continent and throws money around in the hopes of marrying quickly. And he quickly finds a bride in the person of a greedy widow's beautiful daughter. The daughter has another sweetheart, but who cares? Definitely not Varney and the mother.
The Hungarian nobleman vampire comes to visit and ask for money, and Varney tries to kill him - to no avail, because the guy escapes on a boat on the sea. I suppose the author was going somewhere with this, but just like Flora's brother George or the origin story with the Bannerworth portrait, the other vampire sails off the page, never to return.
At Varney's wedding to the unwilling girl, the Bannerworths show up and recognize him, prompting him to run off.
In chapters 127-142, Varney goes to London, where he pretends he's a rich and retired colonel from India, in order to lure a greedy widow's greedy daughter into marriage. However, admiral Bell shows up at the wedding and interrupts it, unmasking the vampire and causing him to flee again. (Varney also tries to feed off of another girl, unsuccessfully, because she screams and wakes up the whole house - like all of his victims, really.)
In chapters 143-144, we find out what happens to Varney if he doesn't feed: he dies of natural causes, then is revived again. This apparently Sucks Big Time - it's a Suck of a Million Sucks. Varney doesn't want to harm people, but he's caught between a rock and a hard place.
In chapters 145-156, Varney encounters a group of travelers and gives them a hand on the road, supposedly saving two women from a tragic fate. He tries to woo the unmarried one (and tries to feed on her during the night), but she doesn't like him (I wonder why - could it be the fact that he sucks? Specifically, sucks her blood?).
When her family pressures her into marrying the nice vampire, admiral Bell shows up at the wedding, interrupting it and prompting him to flee.
In chapters 157-163, Varney goes to Naples - probably in an attempt to get away from admiral Bell and his tendency to show up long after his story arc is done. Varney murders a monk and impersonates him, then tries to kidnap a woman who's been sent to a nunnery to stop her from eloping. He's discovered, and flees.
In chapters 164-168, Varney is in a shipwreck and is the only one who makes it alive to the shore (or rather, he was dead, but he got revived by moonlight). He's brought into the house of the fisherman and feeds off his daughter.
In chapters 169-173, Varney saves the life of an Italian count, who's been attacked by assassins, and tries to get the count's daughter's hand in marriage as reward. He's foiled again and flees.
In chapters 174-178, Varney stops at an inn and kills the landlord's daughter by feeding on her.
In chapters 179-194, Varney stops at a hotel, where there's a plot afoot with a heiress and an attempt to steal her fortune. I was kinda bored at this point, but the gist of it is that her uncle is trying to convince her she's a foundling, and thus penniless, in the hopes that she'll marry her cousin and thus bring the family money into the uncle's hands.
Varney sucks her blood a bit, but all ends well - she remains alive, the plot against her is discovered and she marries her sweetheart. (SO MANY women marrying their sweethearts.)
There are also two chapters in which Varney gets summoned to help raise another vampire - apparently, vampires rise if they committed a terrible crime, or if someone turns them. At this point, the author was like, "oh, yeah, world building, that thing I was supposed to do 150 chapters ago - well, better late than never".
But most importantly, this is when Varney learns how to place his hand over the mouth of a victim to stop her from screaming! You go, Varney! Learn useful skills!
In chapters 195-226, Varney is kind of sick of life. Unfortunately, whenever he dies, something happens to bring him under the moonlight and revive him. So he decides to jump off a ship in the middle of the ocean and hopefully sink to the bottom of the ocean, where the moonlight can't reach him.
It's a good plan, but God sends another coincidence to torment him: he's saved by two fishermen and brought back to their house. Sick of everything, he turns their sister into a vampire. I don't know if he wanted her to be his bride (it would certainly fit the theme), but she barely has a chance to terrify a single girl in the village before she's quickly killed by a mob.
In chapters 227-236, a clergyman shows Varney kindness, in exchange for the story of how Varney became a vampire.
Varney writes down a story in which he was alive during the reign of Charles I and of Cromwell. He was involved in smuggling political dissenters out of London until he was discovered by Cromwell and murdered.
He became a vampire because, in a fit of anger, he hit his son who'd come to warn him about the plot, striking him dead.
At the end, in the very last chapter that's about one page long, there's a report that Varney committed suicide by throwing himself in the lava of Mt. Vesuvius. It's oddly satisfying.
“Varney, the Vampire
- or the Feast of Blood -
A Romance of Exciting Interest”
First of all, holy mother of long novels, this was LONG. I think it’s the longest published novel I’ve ever read.
When I decided I wanted to read it, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg version. Everybody’s seen Dickens novels, so I’ll just say it was 330,000 words long, which is slightly shorter than Bleak House, and vaguely longer than Our Mutual Friend.
Little did I know that the Gutenberg version isn’t complete – only about half of it is there, and the rest is hard to find on the internet (But not impossible).
“Varney” is actually longer than “War and Peace”, and considerably less action-packed.
Because it's relatively unknown and reading it in its entirety is a bit of a commitment, I'll write a longer review than usual, with a full summary of the book.
But first, what's it about, right?
"Varney, the Vampire" was published in 1845-1847. It was a penny dreadful, which means it came out in weekly installments, each costing a penny. There are no pretenses that this is high art - and even the authorship is debated.
"Varney" came before Dracula and before our concepts of what a vampire is solidified. He can walk in the sunlight, but moonlight really makes his vampiric nature shine. It revives him if he's died again, and it makes him stronger if he's weak. He can eat normal food, but it doesn't agree with him. If he dies, the entirety of nature conspires to bring him into the moonlight to revive him again. He can never get rest - for once, it's pretty clear why being an immortal vampire is a curse, not a blessing.
The book itself is strangely down-to-earth, especially in the first part. In fact, it often reads like the author himself couldn't decide whether Varney was a vampire or a scoundrel. In the first half of the novel, he has huge money issues and he does his best to get his hands on a fortune, the way a scoundrel would.
The main characters don't even know whether he's a vampire at all, or if it's a trick to swindle them - they eventually decide it's a trick. Later on, it's revealed that he was a vampire pretending to be a gentleman, pretending to be a vampire. I bet the author himself didn't know that to start with.
Varney is a very depressed, sad, gallant figure. He seems to want to get his way, but preferably without harming anyone - if he can frighten instead of harm, it's all for the good. (Except he does kill people in cold blood a few times)
This might sound cool, but it's very long and very uneven, with splatterings of purple prose and passages which seem to have been inserted for the word count.
And, since I promised a summary...
The first chapter is quite cool and gothic. Flora Bannerworth is asleep in her bed, when the dreaded vampire makes its way into her chamber and proceeds to suck her blood. She screams for help, and her two brothers, Henry and George Bannerworth, rush to her aid, along with their friend, Marchdale, who happens to be staying with them and their mother for awhile.
The attacker looks EXACTLY like the portrait of one of their ancestors, who's been dead a hundred years. If you remember this throughout the book, your memory is better than the author's. Varney gets a different origin story by the end.
In chapters 2-10, Henry, George, Marchdale and the local doctor go off to check the coffin of the Bannerworth ancestor who resembles the vampire. There's nobody there!
Meanwhile, the vampire shows up at the house, who's shot by Flora. After this deed of bravery, she turns around and swoons in the arms of her fiancee, Charles Holland, who happened to arrive from the continent precisely in time to make sure she doesn't get any bruises from collapsing on the floor. A true romantic hero!
In chapters 11-26, people fret. Francis Varney (rrooooolll credits), a neighbor of the Bannerworths, says he wants to buy their house, which is quickly losing value since it has a vampire attached. The fact that he looks precisely like that vampire is Highly Suspicious to everyone.
Charles Holland's uncle, admiral Bell, shows up along with his friend, the sailor Jack Pringle. They're a bit of comic relief and they speak in ocean-related terms a lot (it gets tiring, and then it starts being cute again).
There's a lot of fretting, but not much going on. The vampire keeps showing up, then running off. Sir Francis Varney is repeatedly challenged to about a million duels.
When the author forgets where he's going, he has a character read a story, and we read that story instead of the usual chapter.
In chapter 27, Charles Holland vanishes. We later find out he's been kidnapped by Varney and Marchdale, the friend of the Bannerworths who was staying with them, and trapped in some old ruins. He'll eventually be set free - and Marchdale will die a terrible death, squashed to death when the old ruins collapse over him. This happens in chapter... 75? Maybe?
Seriously, he's gone half the arc. And Marchdale would be a good Disney villain.
In chapters 28-39, we find out Varney owes people money. He later persuades Flora that he wants to suck her blood because he loves her - therefore, she should run far, far away. Because this isn't "Twilight", she thinks this is a very sensible idea, but the people around her want to catch the vampire, so she can't leave, either.
Varney actually fights a duel, but refuses to shoot at his opponent. He's such a gentleman.
The phrase "interview with the vampyre" shows up in chapter 36.
In chapters 40-89, we meet the most remarkable character in the book: the mob. (I'll capitalize it, because heck.) The Mob is truly frightening, and when it gets going, it stops at nothing. It's superstitious and it wants to kill the vampire.
But The Mob isn't a clever force. It's brutal and irrational. It digs up a corpse in the graveyard, it stakes the corpse of a stranger who happened to die at the inn, it burns down Varney's house, it burns down the ruins where Charles was entrapped and where Marchdale lies dead, it kills a stranger who arrived in the village to demand blackmail money from Varney and, finally, it chases Varney around with such criminal intent that Flora Bannerworth decides to help him out by hiding him in her bedroom.
You know, being brutally murdered by The Mob is too terrible a fate even for a vampire.
Somewhere around this time, Flora's second brother, George, is completely forgotten and left out of the story. I'd have mentioned how she does nearly nothing except be protected and talked to like a pre-feminism heroine, but to be honest, her brother vanishes out of the story. He was so useless I even forgot he existed before checking wiki. And everyone around her is so incompetent that Varney doesn't even need to try hard to escape them - his single real enemy is The Mob.
Somewhere in there, we find out that Chillingworth, the doctor who's a friend of the Bannerworths, attempted to revive a cadaver Frankenstein-style - and that cadaver was Varney. So that's an origin story (but, we later find out, not the real one). (Although, to be honest, I don't think the author remembered much of his own story by the end.)
Also, a Hungarian nobleman who doesn't drink... wine... shows up at the local inn (he specifically says this! A century before the movie!) He wants to meet Varney, but The Mob catches him and shoots him. He falls into a river, is revived by the moon, fished out by a fisherman, then tries to suck the blood out of the fisherman's daughter.
In chapters 90-92, Varney manages to get his hands on the treasure in Bannerworth house!
It turns out he used to be gambling buddies with the father of the Bannerworths. After he and daddy dearest lost a fortune, they killed the guy who won it from them, stole it, then the elder Bannerworth hid it in a portrait and killed himself. Yes. He hid the money and offed himself. Varney's life is basically one big bag of suck.
In chapters 93- 126, the Bannerworths become less important. Flora Bannerworth and Charles Holland get married. The admiral Bell has a bit of comic relief with a quaker.
What's more important is that Varney pretends to be a baronet from the continent and throws money around in the hopes of marrying quickly. And he quickly finds a bride in the person of a greedy widow's beautiful daughter. The daughter has another sweetheart, but who cares? Definitely not Varney and the mother.
The Hungarian nobleman vampire comes to visit and ask for money, and Varney tries to kill him - to no avail, because the guy escapes on a boat on the sea. I suppose the author was going somewhere with this, but just like Flora's brother George or the origin story with the Bannerworth portrait, the other vampire sails off the page, never to return.
At Varney's wedding to the unwilling girl, the Bannerworths show up and recognize him, prompting him to run off.
In chapters 127-142, Varney goes to London, where he pretends he's a rich and retired colonel from India, in order to lure a greedy widow's greedy daughter into marriage. However, admiral Bell shows up at the wedding and interrupts it, unmasking the vampire and causing him to flee again. (Varney also tries to feed off of another girl, unsuccessfully, because she screams and wakes up the whole house - like all of his victims, really.)
In chapters 143-144, we find out what happens to Varney if he doesn't feed: he dies of natural causes, then is revived again. This apparently Sucks Big Time - it's a Suck of a Million Sucks. Varney doesn't want to harm people, but he's caught between a rock and a hard place.
In chapters 145-156, Varney encounters a group of travelers and gives them a hand on the road, supposedly saving two women from a tragic fate. He tries to woo the unmarried one (and tries to feed on her during the night), but she doesn't like him (I wonder why - could it be the fact that he sucks? Specifically, sucks her blood?).
When her family pressures her into marrying the nice vampire, admiral Bell shows up at the wedding, interrupting it and prompting him to flee.
In chapters 157-163, Varney goes to Naples - probably in an attempt to get away from admiral Bell and his tendency to show up long after his story arc is done. Varney murders a monk and impersonates him, then tries to kidnap a woman who's been sent to a nunnery to stop her from eloping. He's discovered, and flees.
In chapters 164-168, Varney is in a shipwreck and is the only one who makes it alive to the shore (or rather, he was dead, but he got revived by moonlight). He's brought into the house of the fisherman and feeds off his daughter.
In chapters 169-173, Varney saves the life of an Italian count, who's been attacked by assassins, and tries to get the count's daughter's hand in marriage as reward. He's foiled again and flees.
In chapters 174-178, Varney stops at an inn and kills the landlord's daughter by feeding on her.
In chapters 179-194, Varney stops at a hotel, where there's a plot afoot with a heiress and an attempt to steal her fortune. I was kinda bored at this point, but the gist of it is that her uncle is trying to convince her she's a foundling, and thus penniless, in the hopes that she'll marry her cousin and thus bring the family money into the uncle's hands.
Varney sucks her blood a bit, but all ends well - she remains alive, the plot against her is discovered and she marries her sweetheart. (SO MANY women marrying their sweethearts.)
There are also two chapters in which Varney gets summoned to help raise another vampire - apparently, vampires rise if they committed a terrible crime, or if someone turns them. At this point, the author was like, "oh, yeah, world building, that thing I was supposed to do 150 chapters ago - well, better late than never".
But most importantly, this is when Varney learns how to place his hand over the mouth of a victim to stop her from screaming! You go, Varney! Learn useful skills!
In chapters 195-226, Varney is kind of sick of life. Unfortunately, whenever he dies, something happens to bring him under the moonlight and revive him. So he decides to jump off a ship in the middle of the ocean and hopefully sink to the bottom of the ocean, where the moonlight can't reach him.
It's a good plan, but God sends another coincidence to torment him: he's saved by two fishermen and brought back to their house. Sick of everything, he turns their sister into a vampire. I don't know if he wanted her to be his bride (it would certainly fit the theme), but she barely has a chance to terrify a single girl in the village before she's quickly killed by a mob.
In chapters 227-236, a clergyman shows Varney kindness, in exchange for the story of how Varney became a vampire.
Varney writes down a story in which he was alive during the reign of Charles I and of Cromwell. He was involved in smuggling political dissenters out of London until he was discovered by Cromwell and murdered.
He became a vampire because, in a fit of anger, he hit his son who'd come to warn him about the plot, striking him dead.
At the end, in the very last chapter that's about one page long, there's a report that Varney committed suicide by throwing himself in the lava of Mt. Vesuvius. It's oddly satisfying.
October 3, 2020
I am conflicted about this work. I mean, I *KNEW* it was a Penny Dreadful series during the same time of Dickens, the equivalent of today's Twilight or 50 Shades, and no one would ever mistake it for high literature.
It was sensational, full of bodice-ripping, bloodlust, revenge, mobs, high adventure on the seas, and a snarky villain.
So... wait... it sounds rather MODERN.
Well, yes, in a way. Just not in the way it was written. It was hugely popular THEN and rode the early, early wave of vampire mania 50 years before Dracula made the genre halfway respectable.
Yes, Varney makes Dracula look immensely respectable.
But for all the things Varney is, I keep thinking of the classic dawn-of-movies vampire tales like Nosferatu, the images of all the very worst b-movie trash vampire movies since then, and even the spitting image of Anne Rice's Lestat, (albeit with a LOT less nuance or charm).
I swear, it's almost like EVERYONE that came after looked at Varney and said to themselves, Wow, this is FUN but I really kinda hate how much the WRITING is like trash... I need to remake it! :)
I don't hate this book. I think some parts are rather awesome. Some... made me groan, yawn, and want to strangle the idiots... ALL the idiots. And yet, some parts are rather awesome.
So! Total props for being the hugely popular START of the vampire craze, but the writing?
Muahahahahaha... OH, THE ADVERBS...
It was sensational, full of bodice-ripping, bloodlust, revenge, mobs, high adventure on the seas, and a snarky villain.
So... wait... it sounds rather MODERN.
Well, yes, in a way. Just not in the way it was written. It was hugely popular THEN and rode the early, early wave of vampire mania 50 years before Dracula made the genre halfway respectable.
Yes, Varney makes Dracula look immensely respectable.
But for all the things Varney is, I keep thinking of the classic dawn-of-movies vampire tales like Nosferatu, the images of all the very worst b-movie trash vampire movies since then, and even the spitting image of Anne Rice's Lestat, (albeit with a LOT less nuance or charm).
I swear, it's almost like EVERYONE that came after looked at Varney and said to themselves, Wow, this is FUN but I really kinda hate how much the WRITING is like trash... I need to remake it! :)
I don't hate this book. I think some parts are rather awesome. Some... made me groan, yawn, and want to strangle the idiots... ALL the idiots. And yet, some parts are rather awesome.
So! Total props for being the hugely popular START of the vampire craze, but the writing?
Muahahahahaha... OH, THE ADVERBS...
November 4, 2022
A new all time favorite--easily the best reading experience I've had in a long time.
February 15, 2017
I read this potboiler, in this edition, when I was an undergraduate (a very, very long time ago), and have always had a yen to revisit it. I was pleasantly surprised, and very amused. This facsimile reprint gives ample evidence of how little care was bestowed on the physical production of the novel - it's the 1847 full-length edition that's reproduced, and it's just chock-a-block with bad chapter numbering and pagination, not to mention chunks of type being banged out of alignment or knocked out altogether from the edges of what I presume were stereotype plates. The proofreading could have used a bit of a boost too. But the anonymous author's lamentable tendency to shift back and forth between present and past tense whenever he embarks on a scene-setting "atmospheric" description notwithstanding, this is actually not a bad writer we have here. His vocabulary is extensive and correct; he has a better ability to compose a complex sentence grammatically than about 90% of today's undergraduates, and he has a fecundity of imagination equal to the task of padding out his chapters to the requisite number of inches for the week's instalment.
Indeed, had "Varney the Vampire" been closed out at the end of what is now Volume 1, around page 450, I would have claimed for it some higher qualities, including an interesting suggestiveness about Varney's origins as a vampyre - or indeed, whether he really is a vampyre at all. The lengthy story arc, that of Varney's relations with the Bannerworth family, only really tells us that Varney is convinced that his life is under some sort of charm, and that he believes he has to prolong it periodically - every few months - by a little blood-sucking from a young beautiful female (no others need apply). There is some considerable effort to give Varney an ambivalent moral status; he is generous and charming, and also the victim or potential victim of some really repugnant mob violence. And the mysterious death-and-resurrection of which we eventually learn doesn't take place in typical vampire circumstances at all, but is the experimental resurrection of a hanged criminal by a young doctor.
After the Bannerworth story arc is concluded, the author (who has already been falling back on expedients like "nested" supernatural tales that have nothing to do with the main narrative), seems to run out of steam, and he merely plays two-to-ten-chapter variants on three scenarios: the vampire is resuscitated from death by moonlight upon his corpse, the vampire arrives in town and courts a respectable young lady in hopes of getting married and providing himself with a consistent source of blood, or the vampire appears in some place of public resort like an inn, and attacks a humble but beauteous young female in the middle of the night. In either of the latter cases, he is discovered - sometimes by some character from the previous adventure - and has to flee. The settings are varied (the most distant is a nunnery in Italy), and the nature, motives, and habits of the proposed victims are varied along a spectrum from the sentimental to the broadly comic, but any attempt at psychological subtlety pretty much goes out the window, and as our author goes through the motions, the "rules" of this author's vampire world seem to calcify (young female victims only, moonlight revives the corpse, and the natural world conspires to ensure that the corpse finds itself in moonlight); one wonders just how much this affected later readers?/authors like Stoker. In any case, there are clear signs of relief, I think, towards the end, when the author decides to wrap things up, and gives Varney a serious case of depression, and a suicidal impulse which results in his throwing himself into Vesuvius.
In the course of such a long tale, there are some choices that are cause for giggles for the reader (and quite possibly for the author). The fact that while all the upper-class young ladies have traditional Gothic-heroine names like Flora, Clare and Annabel, all the lower-class young ladies destined to be blood-sucked are without fail named Mary, certainly had me snorting. The red shirts of the vampire world, as it were. Then there was, in a late stage, the appearance of a character named Dr. Polidori (or Pollidori - both versions were used). And I think maybe someone went to a performance of Macbeth? because one of the few incidents that broke the tedious pattern of the second volume was a veritable calling together of a coven of vampires, on Hampstead Heath, of course.
There's something rather charming about the naively pre-Freudian nature of Varney's vampirism, or at least about the author's way of describing it. We are told many times that it is the vampire's nature to seek out only young beautiful women (which leaves the author in a bit of a bind if he also wants to follow up on the notion that taking someone's blood turns them into a vampire - this author does that only once and then kills off the young-lady-vampire very quickly after one indirectly described feeding from a "Mary" before things get too dicey with any possible lesbian implications). Far from making the sex=feeding connection, the author, from the vantage-point of Varney's internal dialogue, explicitly denies it. Especially in this century, with the current vampire mania being an explicit vehicle for the current younger generation's hormonal urges (of all persuasions and orientations), that the author could expect his readers not to make the connection is, well, rather sweet, though of course irritatingly heterosexist, etc. etc.
I see there is a new edition of "Varney the Vampyre" that unequivocally ascribes the authorship to James Malcolm Rymer, an attribution strongly suggested but not fully insisted upon by E.F. Bleiler, the editor of this late-70s facsimile reprint. So perhaps some day I shall hunt down the latest edition and find out more; for now, though, it's been a lovely little return visit to a class of literature that occupied much of my time and thoughts during some of the happiest days of my life.
Indeed, had "Varney the Vampire" been closed out at the end of what is now Volume 1, around page 450, I would have claimed for it some higher qualities, including an interesting suggestiveness about Varney's origins as a vampyre - or indeed, whether he really is a vampyre at all. The lengthy story arc, that of Varney's relations with the Bannerworth family, only really tells us that Varney is convinced that his life is under some sort of charm, and that he believes he has to prolong it periodically - every few months - by a little blood-sucking from a young beautiful female (no others need apply). There is some considerable effort to give Varney an ambivalent moral status; he is generous and charming, and also the victim or potential victim of some really repugnant mob violence. And the mysterious death-and-resurrection of which we eventually learn doesn't take place in typical vampire circumstances at all, but is the experimental resurrection of a hanged criminal by a young doctor.
After the Bannerworth story arc is concluded, the author (who has already been falling back on expedients like "nested" supernatural tales that have nothing to do with the main narrative), seems to run out of steam, and he merely plays two-to-ten-chapter variants on three scenarios: the vampire is resuscitated from death by moonlight upon his corpse, the vampire arrives in town and courts a respectable young lady in hopes of getting married and providing himself with a consistent source of blood, or the vampire appears in some place of public resort like an inn, and attacks a humble but beauteous young female in the middle of the night. In either of the latter cases, he is discovered - sometimes by some character from the previous adventure - and has to flee. The settings are varied (the most distant is a nunnery in Italy), and the nature, motives, and habits of the proposed victims are varied along a spectrum from the sentimental to the broadly comic, but any attempt at psychological subtlety pretty much goes out the window, and as our author goes through the motions, the "rules" of this author's vampire world seem to calcify (young female victims only, moonlight revives the corpse, and the natural world conspires to ensure that the corpse finds itself in moonlight); one wonders just how much this affected later readers?/authors like Stoker. In any case, there are clear signs of relief, I think, towards the end, when the author decides to wrap things up, and gives Varney a serious case of depression, and a suicidal impulse which results in his throwing himself into Vesuvius.
In the course of such a long tale, there are some choices that are cause for giggles for the reader (and quite possibly for the author). The fact that while all the upper-class young ladies have traditional Gothic-heroine names like Flora, Clare and Annabel, all the lower-class young ladies destined to be blood-sucked are without fail named Mary, certainly had me snorting. The red shirts of the vampire world, as it were. Then there was, in a late stage, the appearance of a character named Dr. Polidori (or Pollidori - both versions were used). And I think maybe someone went to a performance of Macbeth? because one of the few incidents that broke the tedious pattern of the second volume was a veritable calling together of a coven of vampires, on Hampstead Heath, of course.
There's something rather charming about the naively pre-Freudian nature of Varney's vampirism, or at least about the author's way of describing it. We are told many times that it is the vampire's nature to seek out only young beautiful women (which leaves the author in a bit of a bind if he also wants to follow up on the notion that taking someone's blood turns them into a vampire - this author does that only once and then kills off the young-lady-vampire very quickly after one indirectly described feeding from a "Mary" before things get too dicey with any possible lesbian implications). Far from making the sex=feeding connection, the author, from the vantage-point of Varney's internal dialogue, explicitly denies it. Especially in this century, with the current vampire mania being an explicit vehicle for the current younger generation's hormonal urges (of all persuasions and orientations), that the author could expect his readers not to make the connection is, well, rather sweet, though of course irritatingly heterosexist, etc. etc.
I see there is a new edition of "Varney the Vampyre" that unequivocally ascribes the authorship to James Malcolm Rymer, an attribution strongly suggested but not fully insisted upon by E.F. Bleiler, the editor of this late-70s facsimile reprint. So perhaps some day I shall hunt down the latest edition and find out more; for now, though, it's been a lovely little return visit to a class of literature that occupied much of my time and thoughts during some of the happiest days of my life.
November 1, 2024
From the opening pages, we have our eponymous vampire hovering outside a window, scratching and beckoning an egress into a beautiful damsel's bedroom in order to plunge his fangs into her delicate neck. That's some good Dracula stuff right there! But this is Sir Francis Varney, the titular vampire of a novel published decades prior to the debut of Stoker's famous bloodsucker. Varney is a highway robber who became nosferatu in the 17th Century and who has returned to terrorize his ancestors, the Bannerworths, in order to uncover a secret treasure possibly hidden within the walls of the Bannerworth mansion. This vampire is no fool. He needs cash more than blood.
If you know anything about Varney, it's likely because you've run across this novel thrown in a cheap e-book collection of classic horror or penny dreadfuls, or perhaps you've had a vampire fan name-drop Varney during an "uh, actually" moment. But I'm going to bet that most who have heard of Varney have never read the book.
That's because this thing is ginormous. When you see editions that are something like 800 pages or so, it is important to clarify that these pages are usually double columned with very small print. The full text of the novel is actually something like 2,200 pages, making this certainly the longest horror novel I've ever read.
But don't let that deter you from reading it if you find yourself interested. I assure you that this is not a challenging undertaking, and the pages really do fly by. But is it worth sitting down and devoting your attention to this thing for the entirety of its epic run? That's what I hope to help you figure out.
The reason it is so long is that it first was a serialized novel that ran from 1845-1847 in the original "pulp magazines" of Britain, which were cheap booklets called "penny dreadfuls". This was popular entertainment of the day, so these pages are not packed with dense material, philosophical inquiry, and rich character development. Oh, quite the contrary.
In fact, this book is one of the rare examples where I would recommend you skim. This is partially because of the serialized nature, so there is a lot of repetition in the chapters to catch readers up to speed on previous installments. But there is also a hell of a lot of padding here. The author (or authors) was getting paid by the line, and he doesn't try to disguise the fact that he intended to milk the publisher for every cent. Allow me to illustrate:
We have page after page of two characters discussing and planning what they are going to do next. Then someone else joins the discussion, and all the previous planning is reiterated for the newcomer. Then another person comes in and we get more of the same. Then they go and tell someone else about their plans. Then they finally enact their plans, but there's even more fooling around. Someone says, "Hark! We will need lights to explore this dark tomb that we've been talking about exploring for the past twenty pages, but after all our bullshitting, we are still not prepared. I have remembered to bring candles, but no matches! How will we see without matches?" And another person will say, "You're right! How will we ever see without matches to light our candles? We must go back and get matches or we'll never be able to see in this dastardly dark. I think there are some matches back at the house, surely, but it's a half mile away. I don't feel like walking that far." And another will say, "Never fear! For I have brought matches. Now we can light our candles and see our way in the dark tomb and solve this mystery." And then someone else will say, "That's jolly good fortune! Thank goodness you have thought to bring matches. Now we can light our candles with which to see in the dark and solve the mystery. Bring out the candles so that we may light them." And then the first guy who was lamenting that he forgot the matches actually has the temerity to say, "Oh silly me, here are the candles... and the matches to go with them! I must have had the matches with me all along. So I didn't forget them after all! Ha ha ha! That would have been unfortunate to walk all the way back to the house to look for matches, wouldn't it have been?" And then, "Yes, indeed it would have been unfortunate to have gone all the way back to the house for nothing. But now we all have more than enough matches. Hurrah! Now let us proceed to light the candles so that we may see in the dark and solve this most pressing mystery. Time is of the essence, you know!"
You get the picture. What's worse is that you know probably all of these assholes smoke, so you can be damn sure that none of them left home without being able to light their pipes in the first place. But the whole novel is riddled with these moronic conversations that do not serve the plot and are only lazy ways to extend the word count.
I might even suggest you decide your own point for jumping ship, which is normally something I'd never endorse! This is because the main "plot" is pretty much over before the halfway mark. Much of the latter half consists of episodic narratives of Varney trying to get married in various parts of Europe--and even, it seems, in various periods of history. We jump from early Victorian London to possibly the 17th or 18th Centuries, and then even to the days of the Spanish Inquisition. I know "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition," but here I was REALLY taken by surprise! Each episode is practically the same, only with slight variations. Varney, in various disguises, ingratiates himself into the lives of multiple young women in the hopes of getting hitched. He is either very lonely or needs a bride for a constant source of sustenance. There's also some hint that he needs to get married to lift the curse on him, but this is not really explored. Regardless, this happens about eight times, and he is foiled in the most anticlimactic ways. Varney's identity is usually kept secret in these episodes until the end, so that the reader has a little sense of mystery in trying to figure out which of the new cast is the vampire, but it's always pretty obvious. It's the tall sickly-looking guy in a cape who wants to marry someone's hottie daughter.
It is possible that the popularity of the serial prompted the publishers to commission more entries than intended, furthering the sprawl. Also, it is unknown who exactly wrote the book, and it may be that more than one person contributed, requiring a lot of different ideas to be crammed into one serial, and making the lore get a little out of control. Interesting mysteries are left unsolved, and engaging plot points forgotten. Think of it like the literary example of something like "Doctor Who". Why did this happen? Well, the business of penny dreadfuls was essentially "factory" publishing. Little care was taken in writing and editing, and all of this can be devastating in maintaining consistency throughout a story of this length. So we get lots of crazy mistakes, including Varney's real name changing from Marmaduke to Runnagate, and even several different origin stories for Varney. Part of the fun is picking out all the incongruous errors and trying to make some kind of bizarre head cannon to tie them all together, because this thing has worse continuity than the Friday the 13th franchise!
If what I've said so far hasn't put you off, then you'll probably really like this book. I confess that, if you just go with the flow, it is an effective way to turn off your brain while still enjoying some fun adventure.
But what about the character of Varney himself? He's actually awesome! For some reason, I immediately pictured in my head that Varney looked and acted a lot like Peter Cushing. Yes, I know that Peter Cushing never played a vampire, but Varney behaves very much like Cushing in the Hammer Frankenstein films. He is a cultured, soft-spoken gentleman, but is also a passive-aggressive turd. He is adept at calmly making smartass comments which cause everybody to lose their temper, and he relishes it. He's the baddie you love to hate.
But as unscrupulous as he can be, he's really not all that evil. At least, that seemed to be the original intention. I was surprised at how nuanced and complex his character could be. He usually does not try to kill his victims, and ultimately seems to want a loving partner who will willingly share their blood on the rare occasions he requires. He loathes having to take blood at all. He is capable of great compassion at times. At others, he can be a simpering coward, because he is really not immortal. I mentioned that Varney carries with him many characteristics we associate with modern vampires that had not been seen before, but he also has some traits that make him unique. Though he can be revived by light from the full moon, he is capable of being hurt, and even killed, not by wooden stakes and garlic and crosses, but just like any mortal, so this makes him more vulnerable than other vampires in literature. He is not really much different from regular humans, other than his longevity which requires blood to sustain. So this makes his constant mistreatment by unruly and superstitious mobs a powerful point of the novel. He is a tragic hero blessed with long life at a terrible price.
The author does a very good job with this material in the first half, and so the reader does end up rooting for Varney, just like we do for the Frankenstein monster. In fact, there are other similarities between Varney and Mary Shelley's famous creation. At one point in the serial, Varney is revived in a medical experiment by electricity. So not only does Varney give us Dracula movie tropes, but may have influenced Universal to use electricity to give life to Boris Karloff's flat-headed icon!
The problem is that once we get into the back half, all the pathos from Varney's character is mostly gone. For example, he kills two unarmed middle-aged ladies and a kind old monk for no good reason. He is also guilty of other acts of savagery. This is supposed to be the same character that earlier was too noble to kill anyone, even in self-defense. It's this kind of thing that leads me to believe more than one writer had a hand in this hodgepodge of a story.
The rest of the cast is mostly bland. There are some exceptions, though. Most notable are the old cantankerous but soft-hearted sea dog, Admiral Bell, and his drunken companion, Jack Pringle. These two bicker like an old married couple and really command any scene they are in, though their comic relief does wear a bit thin at times. The admiral is always telling Jack, "Shut your noise, you!" and Jack is always either threatening to leave or enthusiastically saying "Aye, aye, sir!" And they keep referring to people as "strange fish." This is the most overused term in the whole novel, because more than one character uses it whenever they refer to Varney or anyone else that looks or behaves out of the ordinary.
Flora Bannerworth, the love interest in the first third of the story, is a mixed bag. She has an interesting arc and some strong potential, but she can't escape the 19th Century tradition of the fragile damsel. In the first 20 chapters, she faints as many times. In all my life, you know how many times I've experienced someone fainting? Once. And the person who fainted was ME! Anyway, I can't stand how these gothic romances make women swoon the moment they so much as get out of bed. Girl, you need to stay hydrated! And eat a good steak and some spinach every now and then, will ya? She does manage to graze Varney with a bullet though! She faints immediately afterwards, but at least that's something. What is even more annoying is that, each time she passes out, everyone else in the cast acts like they are surprised. "Oh, how horrible! She's fainted!" It would have shown some self-awareness on the part of the author if at some point someone didn't just say, "Oh, she's at it again. No, just leave her where she is. She'll snap out of it after a bit."
I should also mention that another interesting quirk about the book is that it embeds stories within the main story. Not only are there multiple subplots which we must follow, but the main narration takes a break every now and then to talk about something completely different. The first time it happens is when, seemingly out of nowhere, Admiral Bell tells a tale about one of his experiences at sea. It takes up a full chapter and has nothing to do with Varney. Nonetheless, it is a great little anecdote, incredibly eerie and with memorable characters all its own. I actually enjoyed almost all these diversions.
My final verdict is that "Varney the Vampire" is the poster child for popular fiction produced by mass market publishing. It represents everything that is wrong with the industry even today, but also why we read this stuff in the first place. It provides hours of cozy armchair fun for all its many flaws. It also is notable for being the real inspiration for modern vampire tropes and gothic horror cliches we take for granted today. It is probably one of the most influential books that no one today has read.
Will you join the ranks of the few who have conquered the epic tome that is Varney the Vampire? If you are a classic horror fan, I think you should. And for an extra treat, there are several newer editions that include all the original illustrations that will really put you in the mindset of Victorian working class families, reading aloud to each other the latest edition of Varney and giving each other the shivers before a warm fire.
SCORE: 3 strange fish out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Valetudinarian
If you know anything about Varney, it's likely because you've run across this novel thrown in a cheap e-book collection of classic horror or penny dreadfuls, or perhaps you've had a vampire fan name-drop Varney during an "uh, actually" moment. But I'm going to bet that most who have heard of Varney have never read the book.
That's because this thing is ginormous. When you see editions that are something like 800 pages or so, it is important to clarify that these pages are usually double columned with very small print. The full text of the novel is actually something like 2,200 pages, making this certainly the longest horror novel I've ever read.
But don't let that deter you from reading it if you find yourself interested. I assure you that this is not a challenging undertaking, and the pages really do fly by. But is it worth sitting down and devoting your attention to this thing for the entirety of its epic run? That's what I hope to help you figure out.
The reason it is so long is that it first was a serialized novel that ran from 1845-1847 in the original "pulp magazines" of Britain, which were cheap booklets called "penny dreadfuls". This was popular entertainment of the day, so these pages are not packed with dense material, philosophical inquiry, and rich character development. Oh, quite the contrary.
In fact, this book is one of the rare examples where I would recommend you skim. This is partially because of the serialized nature, so there is a lot of repetition in the chapters to catch readers up to speed on previous installments. But there is also a hell of a lot of padding here. The author (or authors) was getting paid by the line, and he doesn't try to disguise the fact that he intended to milk the publisher for every cent. Allow me to illustrate:
We have page after page of two characters discussing and planning what they are going to do next. Then someone else joins the discussion, and all the previous planning is reiterated for the newcomer. Then another person comes in and we get more of the same. Then they go and tell someone else about their plans. Then they finally enact their plans, but there's even more fooling around. Someone says, "Hark! We will need lights to explore this dark tomb that we've been talking about exploring for the past twenty pages, but after all our bullshitting, we are still not prepared. I have remembered to bring candles, but no matches! How will we see without matches?" And another person will say, "You're right! How will we ever see without matches to light our candles? We must go back and get matches or we'll never be able to see in this dastardly dark. I think there are some matches back at the house, surely, but it's a half mile away. I don't feel like walking that far." And another will say, "Never fear! For I have brought matches. Now we can light our candles and see our way in the dark tomb and solve this mystery." And then someone else will say, "That's jolly good fortune! Thank goodness you have thought to bring matches. Now we can light our candles with which to see in the dark and solve the mystery. Bring out the candles so that we may light them." And then the first guy who was lamenting that he forgot the matches actually has the temerity to say, "Oh silly me, here are the candles... and the matches to go with them! I must have had the matches with me all along. So I didn't forget them after all! Ha ha ha! That would have been unfortunate to walk all the way back to the house to look for matches, wouldn't it have been?" And then, "Yes, indeed it would have been unfortunate to have gone all the way back to the house for nothing. But now we all have more than enough matches. Hurrah! Now let us proceed to light the candles so that we may see in the dark and solve this most pressing mystery. Time is of the essence, you know!"
You get the picture. What's worse is that you know probably all of these assholes smoke, so you can be damn sure that none of them left home without being able to light their pipes in the first place. But the whole novel is riddled with these moronic conversations that do not serve the plot and are only lazy ways to extend the word count.
I might even suggest you decide your own point for jumping ship, which is normally something I'd never endorse! This is because the main "plot" is pretty much over before the halfway mark. Much of the latter half consists of episodic narratives of Varney trying to get married in various parts of Europe--and even, it seems, in various periods of history. We jump from early Victorian London to possibly the 17th or 18th Centuries, and then even to the days of the Spanish Inquisition. I know "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition," but here I was REALLY taken by surprise! Each episode is practically the same, only with slight variations. Varney, in various disguises, ingratiates himself into the lives of multiple young women in the hopes of getting hitched. He is either very lonely or needs a bride for a constant source of sustenance. There's also some hint that he needs to get married to lift the curse on him, but this is not really explored. Regardless, this happens about eight times, and he is foiled in the most anticlimactic ways. Varney's identity is usually kept secret in these episodes until the end, so that the reader has a little sense of mystery in trying to figure out which of the new cast is the vampire, but it's always pretty obvious. It's the tall sickly-looking guy in a cape who wants to marry someone's hottie daughter.
It is possible that the popularity of the serial prompted the publishers to commission more entries than intended, furthering the sprawl. Also, it is unknown who exactly wrote the book, and it may be that more than one person contributed, requiring a lot of different ideas to be crammed into one serial, and making the lore get a little out of control. Interesting mysteries are left unsolved, and engaging plot points forgotten. Think of it like the literary example of something like "Doctor Who". Why did this happen? Well, the business of penny dreadfuls was essentially "factory" publishing. Little care was taken in writing and editing, and all of this can be devastating in maintaining consistency throughout a story of this length. So we get lots of crazy mistakes, including Varney's real name changing from Marmaduke to Runnagate, and even several different origin stories for Varney. Part of the fun is picking out all the incongruous errors and trying to make some kind of bizarre head cannon to tie them all together, because this thing has worse continuity than the Friday the 13th franchise!
If what I've said so far hasn't put you off, then you'll probably really like this book. I confess that, if you just go with the flow, it is an effective way to turn off your brain while still enjoying some fun adventure.
But what about the character of Varney himself? He's actually awesome! For some reason, I immediately pictured in my head that Varney looked and acted a lot like Peter Cushing. Yes, I know that Peter Cushing never played a vampire, but Varney behaves very much like Cushing in the Hammer Frankenstein films. He is a cultured, soft-spoken gentleman, but is also a passive-aggressive turd. He is adept at calmly making smartass comments which cause everybody to lose their temper, and he relishes it. He's the baddie you love to hate.
But as unscrupulous as he can be, he's really not all that evil. At least, that seemed to be the original intention. I was surprised at how nuanced and complex his character could be. He usually does not try to kill his victims, and ultimately seems to want a loving partner who will willingly share their blood on the rare occasions he requires. He loathes having to take blood at all. He is capable of great compassion at times. At others, he can be a simpering coward, because he is really not immortal. I mentioned that Varney carries with him many characteristics we associate with modern vampires that had not been seen before, but he also has some traits that make him unique. Though he can be revived by light from the full moon, he is capable of being hurt, and even killed, not by wooden stakes and garlic and crosses, but just like any mortal, so this makes him more vulnerable than other vampires in literature. He is not really much different from regular humans, other than his longevity which requires blood to sustain. So this makes his constant mistreatment by unruly and superstitious mobs a powerful point of the novel. He is a tragic hero blessed with long life at a terrible price.
The author does a very good job with this material in the first half, and so the reader does end up rooting for Varney, just like we do for the Frankenstein monster. In fact, there are other similarities between Varney and Mary Shelley's famous creation. At one point in the serial, Varney is revived in a medical experiment by electricity. So not only does Varney give us Dracula movie tropes, but may have influenced Universal to use electricity to give life to Boris Karloff's flat-headed icon!
The problem is that once we get into the back half, all the pathos from Varney's character is mostly gone. For example, he kills two unarmed middle-aged ladies and a kind old monk for no good reason. He is also guilty of other acts of savagery. This is supposed to be the same character that earlier was too noble to kill anyone, even in self-defense. It's this kind of thing that leads me to believe more than one writer had a hand in this hodgepodge of a story.
The rest of the cast is mostly bland. There are some exceptions, though. Most notable are the old cantankerous but soft-hearted sea dog, Admiral Bell, and his drunken companion, Jack Pringle. These two bicker like an old married couple and really command any scene they are in, though their comic relief does wear a bit thin at times. The admiral is always telling Jack, "Shut your noise, you!" and Jack is always either threatening to leave or enthusiastically saying "Aye, aye, sir!" And they keep referring to people as "strange fish." This is the most overused term in the whole novel, because more than one character uses it whenever they refer to Varney or anyone else that looks or behaves out of the ordinary.
Flora Bannerworth, the love interest in the first third of the story, is a mixed bag. She has an interesting arc and some strong potential, but she can't escape the 19th Century tradition of the fragile damsel. In the first 20 chapters, she faints as many times. In all my life, you know how many times I've experienced someone fainting? Once. And the person who fainted was ME! Anyway, I can't stand how these gothic romances make women swoon the moment they so much as get out of bed. Girl, you need to stay hydrated! And eat a good steak and some spinach every now and then, will ya? She does manage to graze Varney with a bullet though! She faints immediately afterwards, but at least that's something. What is even more annoying is that, each time she passes out, everyone else in the cast acts like they are surprised. "Oh, how horrible! She's fainted!" It would have shown some self-awareness on the part of the author if at some point someone didn't just say, "Oh, she's at it again. No, just leave her where she is. She'll snap out of it after a bit."
I should also mention that another interesting quirk about the book is that it embeds stories within the main story. Not only are there multiple subplots which we must follow, but the main narration takes a break every now and then to talk about something completely different. The first time it happens is when, seemingly out of nowhere, Admiral Bell tells a tale about one of his experiences at sea. It takes up a full chapter and has nothing to do with Varney. Nonetheless, it is a great little anecdote, incredibly eerie and with memorable characters all its own. I actually enjoyed almost all these diversions.
My final verdict is that "Varney the Vampire" is the poster child for popular fiction produced by mass market publishing. It represents everything that is wrong with the industry even today, but also why we read this stuff in the first place. It provides hours of cozy armchair fun for all its many flaws. It also is notable for being the real inspiration for modern vampire tropes and gothic horror cliches we take for granted today. It is probably one of the most influential books that no one today has read.
Will you join the ranks of the few who have conquered the epic tome that is Varney the Vampire? If you are a classic horror fan, I think you should. And for an extra treat, there are several newer editions that include all the original illustrations that will really put you in the mindset of Victorian working class families, reading aloud to each other the latest edition of Varney and giving each other the shivers before a warm fire.
SCORE: 3 strange fish out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Valetudinarian
May 26, 2012
I have to admit, upfront, that I didn’t finish this book. I plan to (someday), but right now all I really want is to put as much distance between me and Varney. The breaking point was getting to the end of my kindle version and realizing that, besides the 96 chapters contained in it, I had 124 more to look forward to. 124 more chapters filled with more and more repetitive actions, mindless chatter, and a vampire that instead of looking like this:
Is more and more looking like a 19th century version of this:
“Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood” starts promising enough. In the middle of a stormy night, a beautiful maiden is attacked by a vampire and left for dead while her brothers hunt the villain. As the story progresses we learn that the girl, Flora, survived the attack and is now the middle of a convoluted plot designed by her attacker to gain possession of the house her family inhabits. At first the mystery is compelling and I honestly couldn’t wait to read what happened next (hence the 3 star rating) but before long the rhythm of the story starts to become repetitive: Varney does something, a furious mob attacks, he hides. Then he finds some other hideout, another mob appears, and he runs again. Little by little the force of that first chapter, the strength and terrifying power of the monster that is so apparent there dilutes, and by the time I gave up all I had left was the silhouette of a broken man tumbling along and trying to atone for past mistakes.
That being said, I also believe that any self-respecting vampire fan should at least take a peek at this story. The influence it has on Dracula is clear, except for the restoring power of moonbeams and the ability of walking in daytime without any decrease in power. Varney (at the beginning, at least) has that hypnotic power over his victims that forces them to submit to his will, and a level of class and distinction that vampires didn’t have before. Too bad that at times he resembles Edward Cullen more than the Lord of Darkness, but at least he doesn’t sparkle.
The rest of the characters in “Varney the Vampire” are pretty bland. Flora and her fiancé, Charles Holland, fill the hero and heroine rolls to perfection, even desiring no harm upon the being that almost took away the sanity of said girl despite his many, many crimes. The only exceptions to the rule are Admiral Bell and his best friend/servant, Jack Pringle. Their constant arguments and expressions were a much welcome relief, even if later they also got a bit tedious.
But even after everything I said before, one has to keep in mind that this book was published as a series, a “penny dreadful”. It was meant to entertain and amuse through short chapters and it’s kind of unfair to judge it by today’s standards. It does manage to engage the attention and, with heavy (HEAVY) editing it could have been a memorable vampire tale. I hope to finish It one day and tell you how the story of “Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood” ends.
Is more and more looking like a 19th century version of this:
“Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood” starts promising enough. In the middle of a stormy night, a beautiful maiden is attacked by a vampire and left for dead while her brothers hunt the villain. As the story progresses we learn that the girl, Flora, survived the attack and is now the middle of a convoluted plot designed by her attacker to gain possession of the house her family inhabits. At first the mystery is compelling and I honestly couldn’t wait to read what happened next (hence the 3 star rating) but before long the rhythm of the story starts to become repetitive: Varney does something, a furious mob attacks, he hides. Then he finds some other hideout, another mob appears, and he runs again. Little by little the force of that first chapter, the strength and terrifying power of the monster that is so apparent there dilutes, and by the time I gave up all I had left was the silhouette of a broken man tumbling along and trying to atone for past mistakes.
That being said, I also believe that any self-respecting vampire fan should at least take a peek at this story. The influence it has on Dracula is clear, except for the restoring power of moonbeams and the ability of walking in daytime without any decrease in power. Varney (at the beginning, at least) has that hypnotic power over his victims that forces them to submit to his will, and a level of class and distinction that vampires didn’t have before. Too bad that at times he resembles Edward Cullen more than the Lord of Darkness, but at least he doesn’t sparkle.
The rest of the characters in “Varney the Vampire” are pretty bland. Flora and her fiancé, Charles Holland, fill the hero and heroine rolls to perfection, even desiring no harm upon the being that almost took away the sanity of said girl despite his many, many crimes. The only exceptions to the rule are Admiral Bell and his best friend/servant, Jack Pringle. Their constant arguments and expressions were a much welcome relief, even if later they also got a bit tedious.
But even after everything I said before, one has to keep in mind that this book was published as a series, a “penny dreadful”. It was meant to entertain and amuse through short chapters and it’s kind of unfair to judge it by today’s standards. It does manage to engage the attention and, with heavy (HEAVY) editing it could have been a memorable vampire tale. I hope to finish It one day and tell you how the story of “Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood” ends.
May 27, 2015
Evokes gothic atmosphere maybe with three sentences overall (the first chapter is alright). Varney's interesting in theory, as he's a sympathetic vampire and by far the only character who actually has a soul (ha!). The others are like cardboard cutouts. Not that there seems to be any logic to the story itself, anyway. Rymer either forgot every once in a while what his book was about, or he was so broke that he absolutely had to bloat the text by every means necessary, including ministories here and there that have no bearing on the story whatsoever. A hack writer if there ever was one. Or maybe he just stopped giving a flying fuck.
Would I pay a penny for each installment? Hell no. I knew this would be bad, being a penny dreadful and all, but I didn't expect an exhausting bore. So much so, that it wasn't even funny anymore.
Would I pay a penny for each installment? Hell no. I knew this would be bad, being a penny dreadful and all, but I didn't expect an exhausting bore. So much so, that it wasn't even funny anymore.
March 8, 2017
Very, very poorly structured. Would be better as a collection of short stories. Was very bored after the second 'episode'. Skipped a lot of it. Backstory of vampire insufficiently developed. If you want a backstory, make it proper! Ending unsatisfactory too. Episodes repetitive and annoying. I would say that it had a lot of potential, in terms of psychologising the vampire, but fails to live up to any of it
October 3, 2010
I read a free download, and only because I'd heard it was perhaps the first genuine vampire novel, from the early 19th century. Nobody even seems to be sure who actually wrote it (in those magazine-serialized "penny dreadful" days of pay-by the-word). OK, it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. But if you can download it for free, dip into it now and then, giggle and put it away again. It's, well...friendly. I mean, the vampire isn't a wholly bad guy, the "rational" debunker is a little wacko himself, and everybody else.... The main problem, which probably had to do with the pay rate, is that each scene is described, somebody then describes the same scene at length to someone else, who then says, "My God," and repeats the description to someone else, and this goes on and on. What amazes me is that I read through the whole thing. What's wrong with me?
January 31, 2025
Did I finish this? No. Because it has 97 CHAPTERS. I read 33 of NINETY SEVEN CHAPTERS. So I don’t give a fuck. It was like a fanfiction that never ended. I didn’t know scroll bars could get that small. 2.8*
July 9, 2020
1.5 stars; generously rounded up because the first 25% was a barrel of unintended laughs
I'm not sure I have ever read a book whose entertainment value plummeted so drastically as in Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of Blood. At first, it had the unintentionally hilarious melodrama of an Ed Wood movie. It starts out on a dark and stormy night, which judging from the descriptions must have been more along the lines of a Category 5 hurricane. The bland, flawless heroine's beautifully rounded limbs and marble complexion are constantly mentioned even as she is cowering in terror from a "vampyre". Everything is done and said with the drama turned up to max and it is impossible to take anything or anyone seriously. It constantly teeters on the edge of self-parody, and I got a few hours of genuine entertainment out of it. Here are some of the gems I found:
-"I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture. I can form no conclusion."
-"Do seek your natural repose, and leave it to us to do the best we can in this most fearful and terrible emergency."
-"I know I am a frail reed, and my belief is that this affair will kill me quite... Like my poor dear sister, I do not believe I shall ever sleep again."
-"Now, when anything occurs which is uncomfortable to me, I endeavor to convince myself... that I am a decidedly injured man... But this family affliction of mine transcends anything that anybody else ever endured."
-When failing to find a hidden panel behind a painting: "There is no mystery here." "None whatever... We are foiled." "We are indeed."
Now, if I were a downtrodden working-class Londoner circa 1847, I'm sure it would have been a highlight of my week to get the next chapter of what promised to be a bloodcurdling chronicle rife with mystery and gore. But I can't help wondering if any those people resolutely marched forth, penny in hand, to get each and every chapter of this story right to the bitter end. Because for some reason the next 75% of the book is a load of mind-numbing dross that delivers almost nothing anyone could reasonably expect from a book subtitled "The Feast of Blood". I have read my share of bad books, but I cannot recall any that were so incompetent at simply advancing the plot. Even in the Bobbsey Twins books the writers still knew how to move from one scene to the next.
I was forced to preserve my sanity by skimming the last half, and from what I could see, most of the story consists of:
1)the angry mob burning stuff
2)the angry mob digging up coffins(not nearly as interesting as it sounds, except maybe the brick-in-the-coffin scene)
3)the Admiral trying to set a record for the most nautical terms per sentence
4)the heroes(who are more lifeless than the undead bloodsucker) talking in circles about things they have already talked about 5o times before, and reiterating every single point differently for every other character present
5)the heroes flip-flopping between wanting to kill Varney because he's a vampire, and then having casual conversations with him as if he had just popped over to borrow some sugar instead of breaking in to drink Flora's blood
6)Varney making the Count from Sesame Street look like Nosferatu by comparison
So, to recap, it is much more dull and proper than a piece of pulp fiction has any right to be, and Varney does nothing even remotely frightening beyond the opening scene. It is horribly bloated and overwritten and feels like it was just being made up as the writer went along. The phrase "ocular demonstration" alone was used at least three times.
Despite how miserably it fails at being scary, the beginning did at least feel like the writer had some sort of direction in mind so there the purple prose just added to the silliness. Also there is a character called Mr. Crinkles, which would be an adorable name for some sort of wrinkly animal. Varney the Vampire could have been so-bad-it's-good all the way through, but the plot progression(when any exists) is so lazy and boring that it's really not worth sticking with it beyond the first quarter.
I'm not sure I have ever read a book whose entertainment value plummeted so drastically as in Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of Blood. At first, it had the unintentionally hilarious melodrama of an Ed Wood movie. It starts out on a dark and stormy night, which judging from the descriptions must have been more along the lines of a Category 5 hurricane. The bland, flawless heroine's beautifully rounded limbs and marble complexion are constantly mentioned even as she is cowering in terror from a "vampyre". Everything is done and said with the drama turned up to max and it is impossible to take anything or anyone seriously. It constantly teeters on the edge of self-parody, and I got a few hours of genuine entertainment out of it. Here are some of the gems I found:
-"I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture. I can form no conclusion."
-"Do seek your natural repose, and leave it to us to do the best we can in this most fearful and terrible emergency."
-"I know I am a frail reed, and my belief is that this affair will kill me quite... Like my poor dear sister, I do not believe I shall ever sleep again."
-"Now, when anything occurs which is uncomfortable to me, I endeavor to convince myself... that I am a decidedly injured man... But this family affliction of mine transcends anything that anybody else ever endured."
-When failing to find a hidden panel behind a painting: "There is no mystery here." "None whatever... We are foiled." "We are indeed."
Now, if I were a downtrodden working-class Londoner circa 1847, I'm sure it would have been a highlight of my week to get the next chapter of what promised to be a bloodcurdling chronicle rife with mystery and gore. But I can't help wondering if any those people resolutely marched forth, penny in hand, to get each and every chapter of this story right to the bitter end. Because for some reason the next 75% of the book is a load of mind-numbing dross that delivers almost nothing anyone could reasonably expect from a book subtitled "The Feast of Blood". I have read my share of bad books, but I cannot recall any that were so incompetent at simply advancing the plot. Even in the Bobbsey Twins books the writers still knew how to move from one scene to the next.
I was forced to preserve my sanity by skimming the last half, and from what I could see, most of the story consists of:
1)the angry mob burning stuff
2)the angry mob digging up coffins(not nearly as interesting as it sounds, except maybe the brick-in-the-coffin scene)
3)the Admiral trying to set a record for the most nautical terms per sentence
4)the heroes(who are more lifeless than the undead bloodsucker) talking in circles about things they have already talked about 5o times before, and reiterating every single point differently for every other character present
5)the heroes flip-flopping between wanting to kill Varney because he's a vampire, and then having casual conversations with him as if he had just popped over to borrow some sugar instead of breaking in to drink Flora's blood
6)Varney making the Count from Sesame Street look like Nosferatu by comparison
So, to recap, it is much more dull and proper than a piece of pulp fiction has any right to be, and Varney does nothing even remotely frightening beyond the opening scene. It is horribly bloated and overwritten and feels like it was just being made up as the writer went along. The phrase "ocular demonstration" alone was used at least three times.
Despite how miserably it fails at being scary, the beginning did at least feel like the writer had some sort of direction in mind so there the purple prose just added to the silliness. Also there is a character called Mr. Crinkles, which would be an adorable name for some sort of wrinkly animal. Varney the Vampire could have been so-bad-it's-good all the way through, but the plot progression(when any exists) is so lazy and boring that it's really not worth sticking with it beyond the first quarter.
October 10, 2012
It took me ages to finish this book, which is reputedly longer than War and Peace & Gone with the Wind combined. Yet it's a rewarding slog, if heavy-going at times; one can see the vampire sub-genre forming before one's eyes. The book was originally published in weekly instalments as a "Penny Dreadful" and came out over a couple of years. Clearly, the author (now presumed to have been Rymer rather than Prest) had little opportunity to plan the thing from week to week and the story is all over the place.
The initial plot has Varney, who may or may not be a genuine vampire, terrorising a family called the Bannerworths for financial rather than occult reasons. After the Bannerworth plot exhausts itself, Varney is then propelled into a variety of other adventures, too many of which (at least 5) involve him nearly getting a young maiden to the altar only to be exposed for what he is at the eleventh hour. For me, the most enjoyable of these involves him disguising himself as the mysterious Baron Stolmuyer of Saltzburgh, buying a country pile and attempting to con a craven member of the local middle-classes into giving him her daughter. The mother, as so many of the characters herein, has a certain Dickensian vitality and the writing is for the most part entertaining enough carry the reader through the extreme marathon of reading the entire book.
Most of the tropes of later Vampire fiction are here in nascent form, although Varney has no fear of daylight, garlic nor crosses. He has fanged teeth and feasts from the necks of young women, one of whom he turns into a vampire herself. Varney is killed a number of times but rises under the power of moonbeams; there is a striking chapter where Varney joins some others of his tribe to resurrect a fellow vampire by disinterment and exposure to La Luna. Varney is a Romantic, almost existentially suffering creature and often bitterly regrets his life as a vampire; his end (and the book's) is a jump into the volcano Vesuvius, where presumably the moonshine will not penetrate and he will die a longed-for death.
It is never quite clear how long Varney has been a vampire. In the Bannerworth plot, he seems to be recently made one but later he writes a memoir about having been first made vampire in the era of the English Civil War. Other occasions contradict this. Clearly the author had trouble remembering what he had previously written; understandable as he was doubtless bashing out other Dreadfuls at the same time as this.
For any student of the vampire sub-genre, Varney is essential if exhausting reading. Others might approach with caution, depending on their tolerance for picaresque narrative, Victorian caricatures and attitudes, an authorial editorialising voice and a hell of a lot of repetition. But there's also a lot of enjoyment to be had in the pages of Varney. I am glad to have gone through it.
The initial plot has Varney, who may or may not be a genuine vampire, terrorising a family called the Bannerworths for financial rather than occult reasons. After the Bannerworth plot exhausts itself, Varney is then propelled into a variety of other adventures, too many of which (at least 5) involve him nearly getting a young maiden to the altar only to be exposed for what he is at the eleventh hour. For me, the most enjoyable of these involves him disguising himself as the mysterious Baron Stolmuyer of Saltzburgh, buying a country pile and attempting to con a craven member of the local middle-classes into giving him her daughter. The mother, as so many of the characters herein, has a certain Dickensian vitality and the writing is for the most part entertaining enough carry the reader through the extreme marathon of reading the entire book.
Most of the tropes of later Vampire fiction are here in nascent form, although Varney has no fear of daylight, garlic nor crosses. He has fanged teeth and feasts from the necks of young women, one of whom he turns into a vampire herself. Varney is killed a number of times but rises under the power of moonbeams; there is a striking chapter where Varney joins some others of his tribe to resurrect a fellow vampire by disinterment and exposure to La Luna. Varney is a Romantic, almost existentially suffering creature and often bitterly regrets his life as a vampire; his end (and the book's) is a jump into the volcano Vesuvius, where presumably the moonshine will not penetrate and he will die a longed-for death.
It is never quite clear how long Varney has been a vampire. In the Bannerworth plot, he seems to be recently made one but later he writes a memoir about having been first made vampire in the era of the English Civil War. Other occasions contradict this. Clearly the author had trouble remembering what he had previously written; understandable as he was doubtless bashing out other Dreadfuls at the same time as this.
For any student of the vampire sub-genre, Varney is essential if exhausting reading. Others might approach with caution, depending on their tolerance for picaresque narrative, Victorian caricatures and attitudes, an authorial editorialising voice and a hell of a lot of repetition. But there's also a lot of enjoyment to be had in the pages of Varney. I am glad to have gone through it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
February 8, 2020I think I bought the Kindle edition of this for about a pound a while back and then forgot about it. As I had a cold a few weeks ago, I decided that I needed to read something that required minimal neural activity and picked this. As I started to feel better I became mildly annoyed to realise that the Kindle edition has an error in its page count and I has therefore accidentally committed myself to reading 1,966 pages of 19th century penny dreadful, longer than War and Peace, Middlemarch or The Man Without Qualities. Essentially a extended abuse of the serialised novel format, the general experience of reading this is roughly analogous to being forced to wade through congealed treacle. The plot shuffles and lumbers about, frequently contradicting itself; Rymer probably had forgotten what he'd written 500 ages earlier. Repetition, hesitation and deviation are basically Rymer's authorial credo.
The results of this make for a book that is wildly inconsistent. The first and third volumes are the most obviously gothic throughout; the Italian scenes in the third are reminiscent of Walpole and Radcliffe while the English scenes are pretty comparable to Fanu and Stoker. The second volume regurgitates a Dickensian style plot where Varney intrigues to marry for money, only to be foiled repeatedy at the wedding. Characters like Admiral Bell are decidedly Dickensian as well, giving an overall effect similar to Lucy Westenra being replaced by Mrs Gamp and Dr Seward replaced by Pecksniff. I did rather warm to some of the Admiral Bell's catchphrases though; discovering 'I'll have none of your gammon' and 'Stop it with your gammoning' as slang phrases made a lot of the novel worthwhile. In fairness, it should also be said that there's an intriguingly Faustian aspect to Varney's character, who remains horrified by his crimes throughout. Human characters like Marchdale and the mob that destroys Varney's house are treated considerably less sympathetically.
The results of this make for a book that is wildly inconsistent. The first and third volumes are the most obviously gothic throughout; the Italian scenes in the third are reminiscent of Walpole and Radcliffe while the English scenes are pretty comparable to Fanu and Stoker. The second volume regurgitates a Dickensian style plot where Varney intrigues to marry for money, only to be foiled repeatedy at the wedding. Characters like Admiral Bell are decidedly Dickensian as well, giving an overall effect similar to Lucy Westenra being replaced by Mrs Gamp and Dr Seward replaced by Pecksniff. I did rather warm to some of the Admiral Bell's catchphrases though; discovering 'I'll have none of your gammon' and 'Stop it with your gammoning' as slang phrases made a lot of the novel worthwhile. In fairness, it should also be said that there's an intriguingly Faustian aspect to Varney's character, who remains horrified by his crimes throughout. Human characters like Marchdale and the mob that destroys Varney's house are treated considerably less sympathetically.
December 16, 2016
This isn't a novel it's the equivalent to a 20 season Boxed Set, if the original story ran every week then it went for at least 4 years. Its long, reallll long.
I'm not sure how many writers there were but i'm sure there was more than one. The writing style becomes much less descriptive and over the top around chapter 30 or so much to its detriment.
The story becomes increasingly inconsistent with at least 3 different origin stories for Varney, however it is possible to link everything together with a bit of work and if you assume that the origin stories done after he are simply due to Varney going a bit mad and misremembering.
The mob scene is probably the highlight of the entire run. The middle chapters are probably the weakest with numerous very similar incidents taking place. It gets slightly better towards the end.
I wouldn't bother paying for it to be honest, get a public domain version online, read until after the mob situation or and then skip to the end.
I'm not sure how many writers there were but i'm sure there was more than one. The writing style becomes much less descriptive and over the top around chapter 30 or so much to its detriment.
The story becomes increasingly inconsistent with at least 3 different origin stories for Varney, however it is possible to link everything together with a bit of work and if you assume that the origin stories done after he are simply due to Varney going a bit mad and misremembering.
The mob scene is probably the highlight of the entire run. The middle chapters are probably the weakest with numerous very similar incidents taking place. It gets slightly better towards the end.
I wouldn't bother paying for it to be honest, get a public domain version online, read until after the mob situation or and then skip to the end.
December 4, 2015
And so it ends, and I'm thankfull.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting story dotted with british humour, but there's too much in it. Well, everything is in it! All the clichés: Dracula and Frankenstein, sailors and pirates, gambling and murder, nightime stolling to shallow graves, kidnapping, lies and deceiving... you name it. But in the end all of these plot twists are too much and yes, it does resemble a modern soap-opera.
It's my first attempt at a "penny dreadful" novel: not bad, but not great either.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting story dotted with british humour, but there's too much in it. Well, everything is in it! All the clichés: Dracula and Frankenstein, sailors and pirates, gambling and murder, nightime stolling to shallow graves, kidnapping, lies and deceiving... you name it. But in the end all of these plot twists are too much and yes, it does resemble a modern soap-opera.
It's my first attempt at a "penny dreadful" novel: not bad, but not great either.
April 19, 2019
Phew, what a ride! I set a goal of reading this a chapter a day to actually ever finish this as I'd picked Varney up several times in the past but never found the guts to finish as the sheer volume of teeny-tiny font on more than 1100 pages was just too much. Yet here I am now. Finished. Early. I need an applause for this.
Anyway, I must admit as much as I enjoyed the story at first, it became very diluted later and the middle part bordered on super boring. There were confusing facts about Varney himself who sometimes acted like a real vampire, sometimes not. I'm not sure he got enough redeeming qualities to make up for what he's done throughout his existence but I didn't hate him towards the end.
What I enjoyed was the Victorian melodrama as women tended to swoon at the prospect of seeing a monster. Each chapter was build into a climactic moment so it never really was extremely boring, just that sometimes the turning point was exciting just for the Victorians I guess.
The book is a must-read for vampire lovers as it shows yet another approach on the topic (here it wasn't at first clear if the vampire wanted to suck blood or money out of people) and his development from quite a charming evil man into a "nice" ugly dude spiced things up. But after 1100+ pages anything spices things up, really.
Anyway, I must admit as much as I enjoyed the story at first, it became very diluted later and the middle part bordered on super boring. There were confusing facts about Varney himself who sometimes acted like a real vampire, sometimes not. I'm not sure he got enough redeeming qualities to make up for what he's done throughout his existence but I didn't hate him towards the end.
What I enjoyed was the Victorian melodrama as women tended to swoon at the prospect of seeing a monster. Each chapter was build into a climactic moment so it never really was extremely boring, just that sometimes the turning point was exciting just for the Victorians I guess.
The book is a must-read for vampire lovers as it shows yet another approach on the topic (here it wasn't at first clear if the vampire wanted to suck blood or money out of people) and his development from quite a charming evil man into a "nice" ugly dude spiced things up. But after 1100+ pages anything spices things up, really.
September 26, 2016
Montague Summers described Varney the Vampyre as being “far ghostlier than” and “a very serious rival to” Dracula. The book was out of print when he wrote that though, so that might have just been him trying to be the cool guy who liked the less popular work. I definitely wouldn’t go as far as Monty in this case, but I did really enjoy this book. I mean, it’s deeply flawed, but if you take it for what it is, i.e., complete trash, it’s d_____d enjoyable. It’s exceedingly obvious that the author/authors were making it up as they went along, and a lot of it doesn’t stand up to scrutinous examination, but if you like stories about graveyards, ghouls, chivalrous gentlemen, foul mouthed sailors, bloody murders, and heaving bosoms, this will entertain you greatly. I fucking loved it, and it has me looking forward to reading more of the Penny Dreadfuls that have come out in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series. I have Wagner the Werewolf by Reynolds on my shelf, and I know they have also put out The String of Pearls, the other work by Rymer and Prest.
FULL REVIEW
FULL REVIEW
August 5, 2015
A beautifully rendered classic tale of the Vampyre. This Victorian era Penny Dreadful about Varney the Vampyre is a huge tome of a novel but well worth the time and effort to read. This really brought me back to the days when vampire books were all the rage and flying off the shelves at bookstores. True vampire fans will absolutely love this book and the detailed illustrations and want it for their keeper shelves. This is a superb reminder of why paranormal books are still going strong after all these generations.
February 8, 2024
Finalmente sono riuscita a leggere questo libro che mi attendeva praticamente da un anno e di cui avevo letto le prime pagine abbandonandolo.
La storia è piacevole: si tratta di un vampiro sui generis, sir Francis Varney, poco gotico e molto ironico, che decide di voler avere una casa di un paesino della campagna inglese, in cui però vive la famiglia Bannerworth, per motivi che, anche una volta concluso, non sono realmente esplicitati ma solo intuibili, e che quindi la prende di mira prima tramite la figlia Clara e poi con i fratelli e il promesso sposo della ragazza e, perfino, con lo zio di quest’ultimo.
Il linguaggio è davvero ben studiato e i colloqui frequenti rendono tutto molto snello.
Purtroppo però di trama ce n’è veramente poca e, il fatto che si trattasse di un romanzo pubblicato a puntate sui giornali dell’epoca e pagato a pagine, è molto evidente perché tutto risulta molto allungato ad hoc, non solo tramite i penny dreadful cioè i racconti inseriti all’interno per bocca dei personaggi, che non c’entrano nulla con la storia principale, ma anche perché dopo una serie di capitoli ci si rende conto facilmente che non è avvenuto niente di consistente e che si sono lette solo tante parole inutili.
Questo è l’unico motivo del mio voto basso.
La storia è piacevole: si tratta di un vampiro sui generis, sir Francis Varney, poco gotico e molto ironico, che decide di voler avere una casa di un paesino della campagna inglese, in cui però vive la famiglia Bannerworth, per motivi che, anche una volta concluso, non sono realmente esplicitati ma solo intuibili, e che quindi la prende di mira prima tramite la figlia Clara e poi con i fratelli e il promesso sposo della ragazza e, perfino, con lo zio di quest’ultimo.
Il linguaggio è davvero ben studiato e i colloqui frequenti rendono tutto molto snello.
Purtroppo però di trama ce n’è veramente poca e, il fatto che si trattasse di un romanzo pubblicato a puntate sui giornali dell’epoca e pagato a pagine, è molto evidente perché tutto risulta molto allungato ad hoc, non solo tramite i penny dreadful cioè i racconti inseriti all’interno per bocca dei personaggi, che non c’entrano nulla con la storia principale, ma anche perché dopo una serie di capitoli ci si rende conto facilmente che non è avvenuto niente di consistente e che si sono lette solo tante parole inutili.
Questo è l’unico motivo del mio voto basso.
March 7, 2023
Oh. My. God.
I picked this up at a second hand bookstore. From the title and from the ridiculous number of pages, I knew it would be terrible. It'll be so funny, I thought. It'll be a hilarious read.
This book was fit to drive me into fits of madness. Burying my face into a pillow, yelling aloud at the author as I drove in my car, audibly exclaiming "what the ****" as I read.
You start with a tolerably tidy little story with a set group of characters and you think, 'this makes sense.' Then twists start happening and you think, 'oh, well, I guess I saw that coming?' Then the you start getting really meta and reading books within the book and you lose sight of the original set of characters (Except when they pop comically back up to continue to foil Varney's evil deeds) and you think, 'What the hell is happening here?' Then Varney runs away and starts trying to marry a bunch of women and you read entire chapters of just dialogue between two unknown characters and you start to think, "What do I have in the room that can kill me?"
We have no clue what happens to the original family. We do get to watch Varney be just absolutely blasted and rejected by women again and again and again and again (they do not tell us at ALL what the purpose of these multiple suits are or why he needs it). Nor is it really explained why he can only drink the blood of hot people.
This was absolutely Dreadful. But I guess, still a little funny.
I picked this up at a second hand bookstore. From the title and from the ridiculous number of pages, I knew it would be terrible. It'll be so funny, I thought. It'll be a hilarious read.
This book was fit to drive me into fits of madness. Burying my face into a pillow, yelling aloud at the author as I drove in my car, audibly exclaiming "what the ****" as I read.
You start with a tolerably tidy little story with a set group of characters and you think, 'this makes sense.' Then twists start happening and you think, 'oh, well, I guess I saw that coming?' Then the you start getting really meta and reading books within the book and you lose sight of the original set of characters (Except when they pop comically back up to continue to foil Varney's evil deeds) and you think, 'What the hell is happening here?' Then Varney runs away and starts trying to marry a bunch of women and you read entire chapters of just dialogue between two unknown characters and you start to think, "What do I have in the room that can kill me?"
We have no clue what happens to the original family. We do get to watch Varney be just absolutely blasted and rejected by women again and again and again and again (they do not tell us at ALL what the purpose of these multiple suits are or why he needs it). Nor is it really explained why he can only drink the blood of hot people.
This was absolutely Dreadful. But I guess, still a little funny.
Read
July 31, 2011The bad news is that the Project Gutenberg free ebook version of this I read had only 96 out of 110 or so chapters, so I still don't know how it ends, darnit. The good news is: despite being a "penny dreadful" it holds up extremely well against Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's too long by far, and the dialogue is hilariously stilted, but the latter is also true of Dracula, and Varney is smarter in a lot of ways, including excellent scenes of an angry mob becoming convinced that every neighbor might be a vampire. This book languishes in undeserved obscurity. Comic version to come out soon, I hear.
December 1, 2021
For 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.
I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.
The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.
No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.
I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.
The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.
I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.
Originally posted at For blood and money.
I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.
The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.
No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.
I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.
The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.
I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.
Originally posted at For blood and money.
April 25, 2011
More than a little long and I can see why some folks didn't persevere..it's a lenghty tome and maybe due to it's serial type status is repetitive to circumstance and dialogue throughout...not to mention diversions and tales that really have nothing to do with the actual story.
That said there is also much to commend it..as a work it does have some humour and is acknowledged as presenting certain aspects to the whole Vampire mythos (Dracula included).
It really gathers pace about half way through...before that it relies on a dualing etiquette and an overlong neighbourly dispute between a family and proposed Vampire..the action does rattle along for a while however though the last one tenth of the novel is again maybe too much.
Not then a novel I suspect I will revisit soon but one on which ultimately I am glad I have some familiarity with.
That said there is also much to commend it..as a work it does have some humour and is acknowledged as presenting certain aspects to the whole Vampire mythos (Dracula included).
It really gathers pace about half way through...before that it relies on a dualing etiquette and an overlong neighbourly dispute between a family and proposed Vampire..the action does rattle along for a while however though the last one tenth of the novel is again maybe too much.
Not then a novel I suspect I will revisit soon but one on which ultimately I am glad I have some familiarity with.
December 30, 2020
Despite all its shortcomings, inconsistencies, and incomplete storylines, J. M. Rymer' s VARNEY, THE VAMPIRE is a fun, immersive experience. There are times when the titular character seemingly disappears altogether, but fear not...he is never far away! Published as a series of penny dreadfuls, the first third of the story concerns Varney's effects on the Bannerworth family. After that, the story moves in to other adventures in the life of Varney, culminating in a fast-paced series of misadventures that paint Varney in a sympathetic light. Many of today's stereotypical vampire tropes fins their origin here, so it's worth reading from an historical viewpoint. Rymer's literative style is much easier to follow than other writers of the era, which helps the reader when tackling this massive volume. To date, this is the longest single book I have ever read, and well worth the experience.
December 22, 2022
This is actually a pretty fun series if you don't try to read it all at once. It wasn't published as a novel, so it makes sense that it sort of rambles and seems to repeat itself. The Bannerworth story is the best one, and also the most developed. It can get a bit tedious as poor Varney keeps trying the same tricks for several chapters. I know it's a Penny Dreadful, and people like to look down their noses at the writing. To be fair, some of it is overly floral, but there are many places that have well written nuggets of truth about human nature. No, it's not Shakespeare, but you may be surprised at some of the writer(s)' wise words. At the very least, it's a fun story. Just take it in small doses as intended.
January 20, 2012
I feel weird giving it 4 stars... but I loved the rollicking pace and the authors occasional "asides" - meaning, the little stories thrown in for no reason. But it was a mix of scary and funny, the ridiculous, the sublime. You have to be patient with it and remember you are reading a penny dreadful - this isn't Shakespeare or Bram Stroker, for that matter. It's all about sensationalism. The ending upset me... but I won't ruin it for you.
August 21, 2015
Good grief this was a big book. It took me exactly one month from page 1 to page 1163 of rather small type. BUT it was a really enjoyable read, as the book cover promised. A tad repetitive in terms of narrative action, once you get past the first 400 pages or so of Varney and the Bannerworth family, the pace picks up. Not a lot, but a bit. I'm glad I read this - I can fit at least 5 other books in the space it took up on the shelf.
December 17, 2022
Gets very, very, VERY repetitive but has good parts here and there.
Would I read again? God no.
Do I regret reading? Not really, it was a semi fun vampirey adventure. Lots of fun mystery to begin with.
Would I read again? God no.
Do I regret reading? Not really, it was a semi fun vampirey adventure. Lots of fun mystery to begin with.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews