James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest ~24 hr read

On a moonlit, hail-lashed midnight, a dreadful visitor comes to Flora's window, Sir Francis Varney, the vampyre, in the sprawling romance that gave the world its first great vampire.

Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer's 1847 penny dreadful is a foundational classic of vampire fiction. Lurid, sprawling, immensely influential. Read it for the epic that established the vampire genre, the endless, gothic saga of the tormented Sir Francis Varney, a sensational serial that fixed many vampire conventions and paved the way for Dracula itself.

In its time

Published in 1847, during the 1840s, mystery, mesmerism, and the proto-scientific tale in the age of poe and gautier.

Reading it

~24 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).