Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection: From Count Dracula to Vampirella by Christopher Frayling

Author:Christopher Frayling [Frayling, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500252215
Amazon: 0500252211
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2016-09-26T22:00:00+00:00

WHAT WAS IT?

FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN

This much-neglected story was first published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, New York, March 1859. Michael Fitz-James O’Brien had emigrated to New York, via England, from his native Limerick, Ireland, in 1852, after an involvement in the riots which followed the great hunger. He started writing regularly for Harper’s in 1853, and became the self-styled ‘Prince of Bohemia’ among New York underground authors throughout the 1850s, modelling his life on the recently published Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, by Henry Mürger (the basis for the opera La Bohème). His particular bugbear was ‘the puritanism of the critics’. At the outbreak of the American Civil War he enlisted for the 7th Regiment of the National Guard of New York and, after a short spell as recruiting officer for the McClellan Rifles (during which he was said to have nearly been court-martialled for shooting a member of his own regiment), he was appointed aide de camp to General Lander in West Virginia. During a skirmish with Confederate scavengers (February 1862), O’Brien was shot in the shoulder; just over a month later, he died of lockjaw. In one of his last letters, written when he had just been told he was dying, O’Brien comforted himself with the thought, ‘Great Jupiter! I believe in spooks.’

Most of Fitz-James O’Brien’s literary output (poems and short stories for Harper’s and Putnam’s) was published in the late 1850s. In his best tales of terror, O’Brien (calling himself ‘Harry Escott’) writes in a matter-of-fact style, full of circumstantial details about the world of the author, which gives all the more impact to the uncanny experiences which ensue – a ‘domestic’ version of Edgar Allan Poe. What Was It?, arguably his masterpiece, is an impressive example of the Invisible Force story (de Maupassant was later to use the idea as the basis for The Horla) and represents a literary version of Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (the victims being male, this time). What was it? The answer lies in the title of this book.

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