Welcome friends. I hope this finds you well, and away from the shadows.
This week, our society honors the 112th anniversary of the passing of Abraham Stoker. It is impossible for me to imagine one among us who has not turned the pages of his magnum opus and felt our imagination inexorably altered. Indeed, there are two types of literature: works published before, and after, Dracula.
While Stoker is widely acknowledged for introducing the vampire to the reading audience, we can be assured that the nocturnal subspecies was no less real for existing out of print. Cultures around the world have warned for generations of bloodthirsty beasts that stalked the night. From Greek tales of the flesh-hungry Lamia, to the South American ‘goat-sucking’ chupacabra, we’ve always shared a primal possessiveness over our bodily fluids. In more recent years, stories have evolved beyond the origins of such monsters, to include notions of rivalry between the distinct haemovores. Lycanthropes, for example, have become the mortal enemy of the vampirically afflicted. In my personal dealings, however, I have observed little innate animosity between the two, besides that spurred by the occasional poaching of shared prey.