Michael Sims (1) (1958–)

I’ve always been curious about Thoreau. I grew up near Concord and our school field trips included a jaunt to Walden Pond, now encircled by much ‘civilization’. We were brought up to think his essay “On Civil Disobedience” was some brilliant treatise, rather than an argument he shouldn’t have to pay his poll tax.
This book includes lots of little morsels of information gleaned from letters right down to how he cooked bread but really, what is it all for? I wanted to know why he decided to hang out in the woods (though those woods were really in a friend’s backyard- he was supported all his life by people and this is what makes his refusal to pay tax so enraging.)(though he did pay the highway tax because ‘he used the highways’. Absolutely no idea of funding the greater good in this man.)
All I have been able to glean from these scattered bits of bread (not compiled in any sensible way, either temporally or by subject) is that he pretty well did whatever he wanted and everyone else fed and looked after him. Not inspiring.
It was interesting to read that his father was a pencil manufacturer and the struggles that were had with making good pencils. Good honest labour that Henry joined in on occasionally (presumably when he couldn’t get out of it).
These bits and pieces of information are utterly forgettable in the way they have been arranged.
Thoreau died of Tuberculosis, as did much of his family, again an interesting nugget with which nothing was done.
The author says he wrote much of this book holding the hand of his dying mother and typing one handed. I wish he had spent the time fully with his mother (and his young child). This added nothing to my understanding of a complex and slightly bizarre man.
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I recently picked up this anthology again after a hiatus of three years and finished reading it over a weekend. To be honest I can’t really explain why I had lost interest midway through it the first-time round, because this is a highly readable anthology of vampire tales.

The book’s subtitle – A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories – gives a good indication of what lies buried between its covers. I’m not too sure, however, whether it is helpful to describe the works within as “Victorian”, which suggests that the stories are exclusively by English authors of (more or less) the 19th Century. Although the Victorian era is the main source for the material in this anthology, editor Michael Sims casts his net much wider. He starts, for instance with two accounts of purportedly real-life vampiric manifestations, by 18th Century French authors Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens and Antoine Augustin Calmet. There follow Lord Byron’s “The End of My Journey” and Polidori’s “The Vampire”, generally considered the prototypes of English vampire fiction. Again, they precede the Victorian era. On the other hand, M.R. James’s classic story “Count Magnus” and Alice and Claude Askew’s “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire” are probably too late to be considered “Victorian”.

Alongside British authors, Sims includes works by Continental (Johann Ludwig Tieck, Gautier, Aleksei Tolstoy) and American (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) authors. For greater variety, the anthology also features “vampires” of a figurative nature – indeed, whilst all tales feature the supernatural, some of the ‘monsters’ within are not always of the bloodsucking type.

As for this being a “connoisseur’s collection”, I would say that this is a fair description. Editor Michael Sims cannily mixes the familiar with unfamiliar, with works by established authors of horror fiction (Bram Stoker, M.R. James) sitting alongside lesser-known pieces – such as an extract from Emily Gerard’s retellings of Transylvanian lore, which would exert a marked influence on Stoker’s Dracula. This should make this volume attractive both to newcomers to the genre and to more seasoned vampire buffs. A foreword to the collection and a brief biographical introduction to each story completes a captivating anthology.

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