The one vampire to outlive them all.
Here begins the story of an evil both ages old and forever new. It is the story of those who instill a diabolic craving in their victims, the men and women from whose blood they draw their only sustenance. It is a novel of peculiar power, of hypnotic fascination. The reader is warned that he who enters Castle Dracula may not escape its baleful spell-even when he closes this book...
This trade paperback edition will carry a teaser chapter from Dacre Stoker's upcoming, familyendorsed sequel, "Dracula: The Un-Dead."

The Essential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's greatest horror stories. Here is the complete, authoritative edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of duality, fully annotated with thousands of fascinating facts and legends--everything you ever wanted to know about literature's most famous split personality. The volume also includes a selection of Stevenson's short fiction, including Thrawn Janet, Body Snatcher, Merry Men, and Markheim, and there is a selected filmography of the various film versions of Jekyll and Hyde.

In Blood Thirst: One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf gathers thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a blood-curling compendium of the best vampire fiction since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Organized into six categories--The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire--the collection illustrates how the vampire's ability to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it. Here, then, is the definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike to sink their teeth into.

In the 100 years since its publication, Bram Stoker's Dracula has never been out of print.  Once introduced to the world by the silent film classic Nosferatu in 1921, Dracula became an enduring icon of fear, forever immortalized as a frightful embodiment of evil and forbidden sexuality.

Now, in this fascinating and entertaining account, Wolf examines the various interpretations of the immortal vampire in print, film, television, theater, and literature, including an extensive outline of Bram Stoker's life and his literary masterpiece, Dracula.  Wolf explains how the story of a sexually sadistic undead creature/man who feeds on blood worked its way into mainstream society and how it is now used as a ubiquitous marketing tool for products from hair tonic to children's breakfast cereal.

The sourcebook includes:

* An exploration and the history of vampire myths, including the tale of Vlad the Impaler
* An overview of vampire films from the silent classic Nosferatu to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula
* A discussion of vampire bats and the lore of blood
* A complete bibliography, filmography with movie stills, telefilmography, and a theater chronology
* Maps of Transylvania, London, and Whitby
* A calendar to coincide with the "real time" actions of Bram Stoker's Dracula, complete with sunrise and sunset times as well as the all-important phases of the moon
* And much more...

In the past hundred years, since the publication of Bram Stoker's infamous book, no literary figure has enjoyed a more horrific resiliency than Count Dracula. In film, television, novels, and short stories, he keeps coming back to life, fed by the vital imaginative energies of a world-wide audience that cannot seem to resist his abominable charms. Aristocratic and urbane, deeply erotic and profoundly evil, Dracula's bloodsucking savagery has cast a mesmerizing fascination not only over his victims but over his readers as well. And, as Leonard Wolf suggests, "Vampire fiction...exerts an amazing pull on readers for a reason that we may find disturbing. The blood exchange--the taking of blood by the vampire from his or her victim is, all by itself, felt to be a singularly symbolic event. Symbolic and attractive!"

Now, in Blood Thirst: One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf brings together thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt--male and female, human and non-human, humorous and heroic--all of them kin to the dreadful bat. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a dazzling compendium of vampire stories. Wolf organizes the collection into six categories--The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire--which allows readers to see the many guises Dracula's descendants have assumed and the many ways they can be interpreted. In his penetrating introduction, Wolf argues that such an arrangement enables us to see the evolution of the vampire from an unmitigated evil to a creature we are more likely to identify with. "In a century in which God and Satan have become increasingly irrelevant in the popular arts, there has been an accompanying secularization of the vampire idea. And, as the stories in Blood Thirst will show, sympathy for the vampire has grown as we have become increasingly interested in the workings of the mind." Indeed, the vampire's ability to change over time, to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings, to conjure itself into so many diabolical shapes, may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it.

Here, then, is a definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike, and whether readers find the vampires who inhabit these pages sympathetic or horrific, psychologically intriguing or spiritually repellent, morbidly seductive or comically absurd, Blood Thirst gives us all something to sink our teeth into.