![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
For blood and money
Dec. 1st, 2021 06:56 pmFor 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.
I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.
The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.
No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.
I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.
The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.
I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.
I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.
The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.
No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.
I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.
The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.
I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.