Contents:
He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache, and a pair of horns growing from his temples. At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances.
On the surface, the Victorian age is one of propriety, industry, prudishness and piety. Presented by Stephen Fry, this series delves deep into a period of time we think we know, to discover an altogether darker reality. A storm struck on the night Laura Shane was born, and there was a strangeness about the weather that people would remember for years. But even more mysterious was the blond-haired stranger who appeared out of nowhere - the man who saved Laura from a fatal delivery.
Years later - after another bolt of lightning - the stranger returned. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands.
NO, don't put it down. My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye. The only defense is knowledge.
You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Originally written for the pulp magazines of the s and '30s, H. Lovecraft's astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmic terror that are as powerful today as they were when first published. This tome brings together all of Lovecraft's harrowing stories, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were when first released.
In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles micro-robots has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.
In the 25th century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body or "sleeve" making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Mark Twain, beloved American writer, performer, and humorist, was a self-proclaimed glutton.
They have always been here. In secret and in darkness. Now their time has come. In one week, Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country. In two months - the world. A Boeing arrives at JFK and is on its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Eph Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane.
What he finds makes his blood run cold. In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows something is happening. And he knows the time has come, that a war is brewing So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city - a city that includes his wife and son - before it is too late. Yes, Ron Perlman was not the best choice of narrator, but I've heard much worse.
He does not excel at voice characterizations except he does a good job with the old Romanian vampire hunter , and he speaks in a bit of a monotone but not completely. For all that, I got used to his performance and was able to enjoy the book. As to the story itself, it's a bit formulaic, but the idea of a plague of vampires in New York City is novel enough to me that I was carried along by it. I'm looking forward to the next installment. This is not for bed-time. Genuinely creepy and suspenseful vampire story that reminded me of a modern version of "I Am Legend".
Some interesting mythology that I hope continues to be developed, and very suspenseful at times. Ron Perlman gives a suitably scary performance. I feel a film version in the future. Most of the reviews I've read have been fair--there are some elements of this story which some people may find hard to swallow; the creatures aren't properly zombies and they aren't properly vampires; the authorities take too long to wake up; Ron Pearlman isn't the most exciting narrator.
Still, this story is good fun. It dragged in a couple parts, but largely kept me interested and eager for more.
I'll check out the sequels. I picked this book up because of Guillermo Del Toro. I was expecting something fresh and new but ended up with a mix of Dracula meets CSI meets Blade, which was not bad. The story is well written but at times becomes a bit much with all of the detailed explanations. On the whole the story flows and does not alienate the reader. Ron Perlman did a fantastic job reading. I will definitely be picking up the next installment of the trilogy. Would you consider the audio edition of The Strain to be better than the print version?
Yes, you've heard this story before a bit exactly as before It is very believable, logical and freaky I downloaded the rest of the trilogy before I even finished - just in case the world ended and I lost the internet before I had a chance to head the end! Really enjoyed this book. I was surprised by how quickly I went through this, given its length. I've seen other criticisms of Ron Perlman's narration, but I thought his reading and cadence were dead-on for the subject matter. The story's very cinematic, but what would you expect when of the authors is del Toro.
Can't wait for Part 2. Or, "Why are they doing that?
Dracula, Wake Not the Dead, Vikram and the Vampire (Vampire Horror Book 1) - Kindle edition by Sir Richard Francis Burton, Johann Ludwig Tieck, Bram. Dracula, Wake Not the Dead, Vikram and the Vampire (Vampire Horror Book 1) eBook: Sir Richard Francis Burton, Johann Ludwig Tieck, Bram Stoker.
These guys come up with a new, science-ish idea for vampires and establish it pretty well. About forty percent through the book it all falls apart into a mess of annoying illogic and boring 'action'. The problem is that they want to include 'mythology', ie, a bunch of supernatural mumbo-jumbo. Suddenly the vampires go from interesting to telepathic, from beasts to creatures, no logic for which ones, are super smart and dangerous.
There is no internal consistency. That kills the story. With no logic to fall back on, the authors are left to just make up stuff and, since one of them is a movie guy, it's all about the action. There are endless chase scenes and even more endless and senseless fights. I could go on about how annoying the non-sequitoes, the occasions where people do things that violate any sense of human logic, the plot elements that are emphasized and forgotten.
It would be boring. You don't need to know. Just don't read this book. You will start out thinking I'm wrong but you will find yourself angry that you want to find out how it ends and are wasting all this time thinking, "Come on! Nobody would do that. And, when you get to the ending, you will hate that even more. To call it flaccid and predictable flatters it.
The narrator was great, the details were awesome, this audiobook sucked me in completely. I was actually scared by the end of it, and avoided the second one until I went through some lighter stuff first. It has been a while since something like that has happened! Though the Count is already a fluent English speaker, he detains Harker at his Transylvanian castle for a month, ostensibly to refine his speech so that Dracula can pass for an Englishman.
As the novel progresses, Dracula grills Harker on English legal procedure, and Harker notes, at first with appreciation, that his host has a comprehensive collection of English literature and geographical works. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. British apprehension about white men and women abandoning the culture of their upbringing in favor of the exotic ways of the colonized is conspicuous in the discourse of the period. In old Greece, in old Rome, he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese, and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples for him at this day.
This resonance tracked with the popularity of Dracula and the growth of vampire legends in popular consciousness. Indeed, in contrast to the life cycle of most novels, Dracula did not do blockbuster business on its publication. The elaborate production premiered in Britain in , initially in downscale vaudeville houses before making the jump to the more prosperous West End in February of His Kith and Kin reached an enduring audience.
The term has been applied to several places throughout history, not the least of which is a Greek peninsula near the territory where George Stoker served. The travel narrative also tells of a blood-drinking owl, the Polong, who acts as a familiar to Malay magicians. In , while Dracula was still building its reputation, esteemed British philologist Walter William Skeat compiled a more comprehensive survey of Malay folk tradition, paying special attention to some of the vampiric creatures that Isabella Bird reported and including more detail.
The tales Skeat collected still portray the Polong as an imp that exchanges magical assistance for blood. Rather, his Penanggalan is a more fanciful creature who came into being by accidentally kicking herself in the chin so hard that her head flew off. The first is the Langsuir, a rather tragic figure to Western eyes. She is a mother who died either in childbirth or in the forty days after.
She coasts through the air, screaming like the Irish banshee, seeking the blood of the living.
Malay belief in the Langsuir was apparently very acute; to prevent their undead return, women who died in childbirth were usually buried with marbles in their mouths to stifle the deathly screams. A bittersweet twist on the Langsuir is that she could be rehabilitated: It is hard to maintain professional detachment while thinking of the families who tried this measure on the corpses of young women.
Called the Pontianak, it is also a blood-seeker, though like the Penanggalan it preys on children. In another touch of connectivity with Muslim folklore, the traditional incantations used to subdue the Pontianak rely heavily on the invocation of Allah. China was one of the few non-western countries almost universally respected by European thinkers during the Enlightenment, and learning Chinese culture was considered a virtue, not a warning sign of a weak-willed Briton going native.
By the s, however, that had changed.
China was considered every bit the backward stepchild of the human family that other colonial peoples were. Vampiric tropes were familiar to European intelligentsia who had studied Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a core text on the Buddhist afterlife, told of the arduous journey the soul must take through 58 bloodsucking deities during the second week of its transmigration.
In the detailed study, de Groot goes into some detail about the jiang shi, a Chinese vampire very similar to the Slavic undead familiar to Western eyes. The jiang shi was usually a product of improper funeral rites, such as allowing a corpse direct contact with sunlight or moonlight. Along these lines, extended times between death and burial put a body in danger of joining the undead.
To prevent this, de Groot writes, coffins would be covered with oiled paper and the house cleansed spiritually. If these preventatives failed, the resulting creature would break out of its coffin at night and attack people, usually draining their blood within seconds. Like their Slavic counterparts, Chinese vampires did not decompose, and their bodies were bloated with blood.
The preferred way to kill a jiang shi was by cremating the body and the coffin. De Groot also cites stories of frying the creature in a large pan, though de Groot admits that this is fanciful and doubts that anyone ever tried to fry their local vampire.
Four weary travelers come to a house begging a place to sleep. Three of the travelers fell asleep quickly, and just as the fourth was dozing off, he heard the creak of the corpse getting off of its couch. The corpse went to each of the travelers, breathing on them. The one waking traveler, paralyzed with fear, held his breath as she approached, then lay still as she returned to her place. She cornered the traveler against a tree and made a mad grab for him.
The traveler collapsed to the ground in a dead faint and the jiang shi missed him, ramming her fingernails into the tree. Just then dawn broke, and the jiang shi reverted to her state of unmoving rigor mortis.
The place of India in British imperial history is well-known, and has been thoroughly examined in academic literature. The British East India Company gradually gained effective control of the country in the s, and it remained a highly-studied, closely held colony until after World War II. By the time of the British Empire, India did not have an active vampire folklife like Malaysia or China with people performing numerous rituals to keep corpses from returning from the dead. India did sport an active literary tradition of vampiric creatures, however.
One of the most well-known pieces of Indian literature is the Baital-Pachisi, named for the vampire-like Baital, an evil spirit that roamed the earth possessing dead bodies. His description is aptly horrific, however. Baital is a skeletal figure holding a bat in his toes. At the conclusion of the book, Vikram is finally able to bring Baital to the yogi, and the resulting ritual sees the yogi summon many of the great Hindu figures, including the vampiric goddess Kali, who predict a long and prosperous reign for the hero.
Perhaps her archetypal appearance in Hindu literature is in the Devi-Mahatmya, a secondary Hindu scripture where she appears as the goddess Devi's fury incarnate. In episode three of this epic, Devi is facing the seemingly invincible Raktabija who, when wounded, forms new incarnations of himself from the drops of his blood when they touch the ground.
Suffice to say that tales of a widely-worshipped goddess with jet black hair and blood dripping from her perpetually outstretched tongue was probably enough to make many Britons reconsider their position abroad. The limitations of a conference paper only allow a cursory treatment of the vast vampire folklore collected from all over the British Empire, and these notes on the regions that Stoker named specifically are only an overview.
A more thorough examination would interrogate these folk traditions in greater depth, and would also examine territories of the British Empire that Bram Stoker did not directly reference. The primary response to ethnographic narratives like this was the paternalistic condescension so typical of the imperial gaze; vampire stories justified the ideology that colonial peoples were ignorant and superstitious, and added to their thorough debasement in the eyes of the Anglophone public. Vampire tales from the colonies were part of the same discursive field as Dracula, emphasizing the elements of danger and dread inherent in the colonial process and giving face to ideas of reverse colonialism and mimesis.
In sum, Dracula is utterly a product of its imperial context. To consider Dracula is to consider the culture of imperialism and the imperial gaze in all its manifestations, including those that are grossly, subtly, and chillingly monstrous. The Key Concepts New York: Routledge, , Chapman and Hall, , 3; quoted in Jimmie E. McFarland, , Knopf, , Vintage Books, ed.
Duke University Press, , Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. University of Illinois Press, The University of Chicago Press, , One early study along these lines was Raymond T.