It's rare to come across a collection of short stories that is so engaging as the collection I am reading now. Of course one must be an aficionado of vampire and horror stories to truly appreciate them, and I am. The only other collection of short stories in the horror genre that I feel the same way about was the one I read back in 2020--H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories. They were individual masterpieces for the most part and I wrote a post at that time about his stories and how much I enjoyed them: A New Yorker in Oslo: The creepy and engrossing stories of H.P. Lovecraft (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com)
The collection of vampire stories I am currently reading is entitled Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories, edited by Michael Sims (available on Amazon at Dracula's Guest (Connoisseur's Collections): Sims, Michael: 9781408809969: Amazon.com: Books ). The Victorian Era extended from 1837 to 1901 and was an era filled with social change and political reforms, despite being described as a repressive era, especially sexually. The stories in this collection were written/published during this time. You might think that the Victorians, being the straight-laced repressed people they are often described as, would not be writing (or reading) these types of stories. You'd be wrong. The writing styles are at times verbose and overly-descriptive, but the plots are engrossing, strange, and often creepy. There are stories about entire families that become vampires (The Family of the Vourdalak--quite scary if you can visualize it as an eventual movie, as I could), one about an invisible vampire (What Was It?), one about a very old woman whose younger companion, a male doctor, supplies her with young blood to keep her alive (Good Lady Ducayne), and one about a man who remarries after his first wife dies but who wishes that his first wife could live again (Wake Not the Dead). There are many others that are similarly strange and engrossing, so I recommend buying the book to read them all.
I found reading the short descriptions about the authors almost as interesting as the stories themselves. Leo Tolstoy's brother, Aleksei, wrote The Family of the Vourdalak; he was a talented writer in his own right. Good Lady Ducayne was written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, considered to be a premier sensation novelist (one who wrote nerve-wracking and thrilling, sometimes titillating novels). Other stories were written by the romantic poet Lord Byron, and Anne Crawford (who came from a family of artists and writers). These writers may not have described everything in explicit detail, but there was no need to. Readers understand what is said and what is implied, and that is sufficient. These writers were in no way repressed; far from it.
