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Noted: Vampires we have known, scientifically speaking.

By MICHAEL SIMS [The Chronicle of Higher Education] – Reading about these fictional bodies—bodies of victims and of monsters—reminded me of bodies I had known. I remembered my own encounters with death, from riding in a hearse with a corpse strapped to a gurney behind us to sitting beside a friend’s father in the hospital as he sighed his last breath. I remembered my momentary horror and panic when I fell into the grave. It wasn’t like falling off a ladder. This was a grave.

As I worked on the introduction to the anthology, I merged the two main topics I write about: natural history and Victorian literature. I tried to look at vampires from a scientific point of view. After all, where did we get this fear that, once the sun goes down, the ghoulish undead climb out of their coffins and come back for the rest of us? It didn’t emerge out of thin air.

The vampire story as we know it was born in the early 19th century, as the wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence. But in writing these depraved tales, Byron and Polidori and company were refining the raw ore of peasant superstition. And the peasant brain had simply been doing what the human brain does best: sorting information into explanatory narratives.

Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.

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