Why read Vampire Lore?

Book cover of Vampire Lore: From the Writings of Jan Louis Perkowski

Book description

Perkowski (Slavic languages and literatures, U. of Virginia) found that Slavic folk belief in vampires came to the New World with Kashubian emigrés to Ontario, Canada. The anthology contains this bicultural Slav's collected oral histories and writings on this Slavic mythology since the 1970s, e.g., The Darkling: A Treatise on…

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Mythology

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Why read it?

1 author picked Vampire Lore as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Bruce McClelland

Author

I will argue that the rapid increase in attention to the folkloric basis of the vampire legends in English-language literature is the result of the work of the late Prof. Jan Perkowski, whose book The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism changed my life. I left a fairly lucrative high-tech career to get my doctorate in Slavic Folklore at the University of Virginia, where (full disclosure) I became Perkowski’s teaching assistant.

In 2006, I was asked to write the Preface for a collection of all of Perkowski’s seminal writings on the Slavic vampire. Vampire Lore is a compendium of his…

From Bruce's list on The best books about vampire and slayer folklore.