Non-fiction in the DVD Department

Posted on October 27, 2023October 26, 2023 by Molly

The DVD collection at Mead is fascinating. It honestly doesn’t matter what we add to the shelf, it tends to circulate like crazy. I replaced a copy of Harry and the Hendersons last year because the one we had in the catalog circulated OVER THREE HUNDRED TIMES and had been in the collection since 2008, which is bonkers that it played at all by that point (typically a disc is evaluated for condition after 100 circulations, we weren’t born in a barn over here). What I’m getting at, is that this collection doesn’t require a lot of promotion to maintain good circulation numbers. The exception being the non-fiction DVD portion of this collection. It’s arranged by Dewey Decimal, just like the print non-fiction, which makes browsing more difficult. There are comedy specials, nature shows, history lessons, musicals and concerts, you name it, to be found among the non-fiction DVDs. This is also where the documentaries live.

I wanted to give the documentaries a little more visibility apart from the wall of difficult-to-parse spine labels. The discerning Mead Library patron will notice a two-sided display adjacent to where the DVD collection is shelved on our first floor. On one side is a dazzling array of BluRay discs, another collection area that I wanted to highlight, and on the opposite side I have placed a rotating selection of non-fiction DVDs for your browsing convenience and delight. Below, I listed several docs that are total bangers. You’ll laugh, you’ll learn, and in the case of Dear Zachary, you’ll curl into the fetal position and cry a lot. Titles are linked to the Monarch catalog listing. Descriptions provided by publisher:

Paris is Burning (1991) directed by Jennie Livingston

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade?
This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, it offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion ‘houses,’ from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. PS: Mead owns the Criterion Collection version of this documentary so it will be extra fabulous.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008) directed by Kurt Kuenne

I am not providing the publisher description here because it’s better to be devastated in real time while watching. Bring kleenex and prozac, and hug your loved ones close. Suffice to say, this particular documentary is excellent as well as devastating.

Gates of Heaven (1978) directed by Errol Morris

Errol Morris changed the face of documentary filmmaking in the US, and his career began with a remarkable tale of American eccentricity. He uses two Southern California pet cemeteries as the basis for a profound and funny rumination on love, loss, and industry.

Summer of Soul (2021) directed by Questlove
In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary, part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion.

Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten, until now. This documentary shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past, and present. The feature includes concert performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, and more.

Koyaanisqatsi (1982) directed by Godfrey Reggio

This first work of The Qatsi Trilogy wordlessly surveys the rapidly changing environments of the Northern Hemisphere, in an astonishing collage created by the director, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass. It shuttles viewers from one jaw-dropping vision to the next, moving from images of untouched nature to others depicting human beings’ increasing dependence on technology.

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1994) directed by Ray Müller

At the heart of this film is the question of whether Leni Riefenstahl was a Nazi, as her detractors claim, or whether she was the victim of society – a naïve, young woman who made Triumph des Willens on assignment, and simply did a very good job. This film does not judge, and Riefenstahl (a feisty 90 during production) is genuine in her protest. Or has the passage of 50-plus years simply rewritten history in her mind? Viewers must judge for themselves.

Additional totally awesome, informative, and entertaining documentaries:

Crumb (1994) directed by Terry Zwigoff
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) directed by Penelope Spheeris (we also have Vol. 2 and 3)
Encounters at the End of the World (2008) directed by Werner Herzog
Grey Gardens (1976) directed by Albert Maysles et al
Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) directed by François Truffaut
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) directed by David Gelb
Life Itself (2014) directed by Steve James
Man on Wire (2008) directed by James Marsh

Not so keen on reality? Check out these mockumentaries:

Best in Show (2001) directed by Christopher Guest
Borat (2007) directed by Larry Charles
CB4 (1993) directed by Tamra Davis
Room 237 (2012) directed by Rodney Ascher; note, this was filmed as a straight documentary, but the contents cannot be taken seriously despite my best efforts.
This is Spinal Tap (1984) directed by Rob Reiner
What We Do in the Shadows (2014) directed by Taika Waititi

The above selections are a mere sliver of what riches await you within the non-fiction DVD collection. If none of the listed documentaries are appealing, allow me to direct your attention to our exclusive movie recommendation tool, Your Next Five Movies. Not a fan of the celluloid medium? Consider using Mead’s Your Next Five Books tool. We anxiously await your DVD requests. Any questions can be directed to us via telephone at 920-459-3400 option 4, or email us at publicservices@meadpl.org.

Adult, Award Winners, Fiction, New & Upcoming

Library Reads: October 2023

Posted on October 20, 2023October 5, 2023 by Carol

This month’s books include a locked room mystery set in the Adirondack Mountains, a creepy horror novel featuring twin sisters and their imaginary friend, the story of a Chinese woman whose daughter given up for adoption without her consent, and one of the first Christmas novels (already!) of the season.

Top Pick: Wildfire by Hannah Grace

This fun summer camp sports romance is a perfect beach read. The characters are complex, and the men (other than the ‘bad guys’) are written to be very respectful of
and thoughtful to the women in their lives, whether in friendship or romance. The book is also very sex-positive. Readers who missed the first book in this series won’t feel like they are missing anything, but will want to catch up! —Jennifer Lizak, Chicago Public Library, IL

Suggested read-alike: Never Been Kissed by Timothy Janovsky

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Adult, Audience, Fiction, Staff Picks, Thrillers

5 Scary Thrillers for this Spooky Season

Posted on October 13, 2023October 10, 2023 by Ryan

You may have noticed it, but lately there’s been a chill in the air. The days are getting shorter. The nights longer. And every morning it seems like there’s more and more pumpkins and skeletons cropping up in people’s yards.

That can mean only one thing:
It’s spooky season.

And with spooky season comes one of my favorite pastimes: cozying up inside with a hot cup of decaf Earl Grey tea, ready to read a new thriller. Inevitably, this almost always keeps me up at night, my head on my pillow with wide eyes, worrying about all the imaginary monsters that lurk in the dark.

It’s a bad habit, especially for someone who is a scaredy cat. But I can’t help it, especially when the book keeps me at the edge of my seat (and bed, apparently.) And if you have the same issue as me — or are just plain fearless — and are looking for your next thriller, here are a couple you can try:

The Coworker (2023) by Freida McFadden

Dawn Schiff is strange. At least, everyone at work thinks so. She never says the right thing. She has no friends. And she is always at her desk at precisely 8:45 a.m.

So when Dawn doesn’t show up to the office one morning, her coworker Natalie Farrell-beautiful, popular, top sales rep five years running-is surprised. Then she receives an unsettling, anonymous phone call that changes everything…

Now, Natalie is irrevocably tied to Dawn as she finds herself caught in a twisted game of cat and mouse that leaves her wondering: who’s the real victim? But one thing is incredibly clear: somebody hated Dawn Schiff. Enough to kill.

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, Fiction, Mystery, Nonfiction

While You Wait October 2023: Mother-Daughter Murder Night and Counting the Cost

Posted on October 6, 2023October 4, 2023 by Anneliese

This is a first for this series – the non-fiction book this month has more holds than any of the fiction books! Sometimes, to be honest, I have to scroll quite a ways down our list of most popular holds to find a non-fiction book. People just prefer fiction, I guess! But this month, Jill Duggar’s memoir has shot way up the library’s charts. And on the fiction side, we have a murder mystery that is also a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Get on the holds list, and check out some readalikes while you wait!

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does.

Then Jack—tiny in stature but fiercely independent—happens upon a dead body while kayaking near their bungalow. Jack quickly becomes a suspect in the homicide investigation, and the Rubicon women are thrown into chaos. Beth thinks Lana should focus on recovery, but Lana has a better idea. She’ll pull on her wig, find the true murderer, protect her family, and prove she still has power.

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, History, Nonfiction

Your Next 5 Books: History & Hollywood Glamour

Posted on September 29, 2023January 11, 2024 by Carol

Patron Lori T.* recently asked us to track her down some history and biography titles using our Your Next 5 Books service, and graciously allowed us to share her interests and answers. Lori was particularly interested in biographies of people in the entertainment industry, especially those from the mid-century era of glamour, as well as Wisconsin history, but wanted to stay away from World War II or true crime books.

My main interest is biographies. I especially enjoy biographies about famous people/stars in the 1940’s & 1950’s, including about places like the Catskill and French Riviera resorts during that time. I’d also like to find a biography of Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachael Maddow, and Desi Arnaz’s [of “I Love Lucy”] biography A Book.

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Adult, History, Nonfiction, Staff Picks, Uncategorized

Time to Read a Great Book

Posted on September 22, 2023September 19, 2023 by Corrina

Dear reader, have you ever been reading a book and just felt like it was one you wanted to buy? To highlight it, reread certain passages, or just simply to have it on your bookshelf, resting in the knowledge that it’s there, ready like a favorite comfy sweater, whenever you need it?

This book is one of those books. Chock full of fascinating information and history about the evolution of the watch. The watch is something we take for granted in 2023, isn’t it? I can’t even remember the last time I had an analog watch, and I bought my first Fitbit three years ago. Children and teens alike come into the library and stare at the analog clock we have mounted on the wall behind the customer service desk, trying to decipher its face and the time it presents. Eventually, most of them just ask us for the time. Theirs is a digital world and analog clocks, like cursive, have mostly fallen away. Although, admittedly, my own cursive skills are severely lacking!

Here are some interesting historical tidbits from the book! The first battery-powered wristwatch to make it to the market was the 1957 Hamilton Ventura, which, because production was rushed, was plagued with a short battery life. The world’s first commercial quartz watch, the Astron, came from Japan, released by Seiko on Christmas Day in 1969. Instead of a tuning fork, the new invention used piezoelectricity, a process discovered by Pierre and Jacques Curie in 1880. Amazing how old discoveries pop up in new inventions decades and centuries later, isn’t it? Finally, the very first digital watch was American, the Hamilton Pulsar, released in 1972. The Pulsar used LED technology developed at the Space Agency.

Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers

Timepieces have long accompanied us on our travels, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest, the ice of the arctic to the sands of the deserts, outer space to the surface of the moon. The watch has sculpted the social and economic development of modern society; it is an object that, when disassembled, can give us new insights both into the motivations of inventors and craftsmen of the past, and, into the lives of the people who treasured them.

Hands of Time is a journey through watchmaking history, from the earliest attempts at time-keeping, to the breakthrough in engineering that gave us the first watch, to today – where the timepieces hold cultural and historical significance beyond what its first creators could have imagined. Acclaimed watchmaker Rebecca Struthers uses the most important watches throughout history to explore their attendant paradigm shifts in how we think about time, indeed how we think about our own humanity. From an up-close look at the birth of the fakes and forgeries industry which marked the watch as a valuable commodity, to the watches that helped us navigate trade expeditions, she reveals how these instruments have shaped how we build and then consequently make our way through the world.

A fusion of art and science, history and social commentary, this fascinating work, told in Struthers’s lively voice and illustrated with custom line drawings by her husband and fellow watchmaker Craig, is filled with her personal observations as an expert watchmaker—one of the few remaining at work in the world today. Horology is a vast subject—the “study of time.” This compelling history offers a fresh take, exploring not only these watches within their time, but the role they played in human development and the impact they had on the people who treasured them.

However, as with every invention, there is a dark side to the watch. Thanks to the discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie, hollowed out watch hands were filled with luminous paint. This new invention helped soldiers accurately see the time on their watches while sitting in deep, dark trenches. But it wasn’t only the battlefield that employed this new paint. Watch dials, aeroplane instruments, gunsights and ships’ compasses were also starting to glow.

Dial factories sprang up across the US, and also in Switzerland and the UK. To apply the expensive and precious radium paint to the narrow spaces on the watch hands, women in the dial factories stuck the extremely fine camel hair brushes in their mouths to bring them to a point. They were assured by management that the trace amounts of radium they were ingesting wasn’t harmful, but when you consider these women were paid in dials painted, it started to add up. Radium was touted as a cancer destroyer, but it also has no ability to distinguish between healthy tissue and cancerous. Therefore it began to eat away at the very bones of the women ingesting it. If you would like to read a harrowing and informative book on this topic, I would suggest the following.

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Adult, Award Winners, Fantasy, Fiction, Historical, Horror, New & Upcoming, Romance, Science

Library Reads Top 10: September 2023

Posted on September 15, 2023September 14, 2023 by Carol

Every month, librarians across the country vote for the upcoming titles they’re most excited to read. This month’s choices include a good old-fashioned haunted house horror story, the quest of a godkiller and a minor god she cannot kill, and a lyrically-written survival tale set in Jamestown-era America.

Top Pick: The September House by Carissa Orlando

Margaret believes in following the rules. Four years after moving into a haunted Victorian, she knows how to avoid the dangerous ghosts. But her husband can’t take it anymore and leaves when the paranormal activity escalates to excessive levels. Now their estranged daughter—who’s never been to the house—is coming to visit, and Margaret doesn’t know how to explain (much less keep her child safe from) the specters’ violent antics. —Lucy Lockley, St. Charles City-County Library District

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, Fiction, History, Nonfiction

While You Wait September 2023: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and American Prometheus

Posted on September 8, 2023September 7, 2023 by Anneliese

We’ve got some heavy hitters in the popular books this month. First up is the winner of the National Book Award, James McBride’s new novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. In non-fiction, we have a much older book – it’s rare to see a book from 2006 with so many requests! But when you look at the book, it’s very clear why; American Prometheus was Christopher Nolan’s inspiration for the new movie Oppenheimer.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

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Adult, Fiction, Nonfiction

Book Kits for the DIY Reader

Posted on August 25, 2023August 24, 2023 by Molly

When people think LIBRARY, they think “books”. When books think LIBRARY, we worry about books turning sentient. However, when I think library, I think programming, and a classic all-time library program: the humble book club. Mead offers a variety of excellent book clubs that suit many tastes and schedules. Here’s a list of the book clubs we’re currently running. Click the title to see the calendar listing for fall quarter meeting timings, locations, and books:

Book to Art Club; 2nd Thursdays
Fiction Book Discussion; 3rd Mondays
In the Weeds Book Club; 2nd Thursdays
Maywood’s Nature-Based Book Club; last Saturdays
Moonlight and Murder; 4th Wednesdays
Movie Madness Film Club; 3rd Thursdays
Nonfiction Book Discussion; 2nd Mondays
Romance on the Rocks; 4th Wednesdays
Sheboygan Cook & Book Club; 2nd Sundays
Sheboygan County LGBTQ Alliance Book Club; 1st Thursdays

What to do if none of the clubs are appealing? Or what if they appeal greatly but the timing doesn’t work? The public at large may be interested to learn that Mead Library has several dozen circulating book kits. Book kits contain 6 or 12 books so anyone with a Monarch card can easily acquire enough copies of the same title for a good-sized book discussion. Book kit checkouts go for 28 days with the possibility of renewing twice. All you need to do is decide where to meet and what to snack on while discussing. Below, I listed several titles that make for great conversations whether the desired vibe is super serious or light and fluffy. Descriptions provided by Goodreads. All titles are linked to their respective book kit listing in the Monarch catalog:

Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love.

Gender Queer (2019) by Maia Kobabe

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

*Please note this book was targeted by bigots across the country and right here in Sheboygan under the guise of “protecting children” a few years ago. The bigots admitted to never actually reading this book, just cherry-picking images they deemed inflammatory. I don’t think it’s controversial for me to declare reading any book in full is crucial to understanding words and images in their intended context. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage anyone with a curious and compassionate mind to read this book. It’s one of the best autobiographical graphic novels ever published and deserves the attention of eyes unclouded by hate.

Hidden Valley Road (2020) by Robert Kolker

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

The Library Book (2018) by Susan Orlean

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld (1996) by Terry Pratchett

It’s the night before Hogswatch. And it’s too quiet.

Where is the big jolly fat man? Why is Death creeping down chimneys and trying to say Ho Ho Ho? The darkest night of the year is getting a lot darker…

Susan the gothic governess has got to sort it out by morning, otherwise there won’t be a morning. Ever again…

Here is a variety of additional book kit titles currently available in the Monarch catalog:

The Round House (2013) by Louise Erdrich

The City We Became (2020) by N.K. Jemisin

The Feather Thief (2018) by Kirk Johnson

A Bad Day for Sunshine (2020) by Darynda Jones

The Changeling (2017) by Victor LaValle

Circe (2018) by Madeline Miller

Women Talking (2019) by Miriam Toews

The Underground Railroad (2016) by Coleson Whitehead

And that’s just the tip of the book kit iceberg. Mead has well over one hundred book kit titles waiting for deployment into your life and brain. Search the catalog for “kits” in the format field, and limit target audience to “adult” to see the list. Why yes, we also have book kits aimed at younger audiences, if that is of interest to you parent and teacher types. For help requesting material of any type, or to learn more about book kits and other services do not hesitate to call us up at 920-459-3400 option 4. If you’re like me, and resent having to read on a schedule and therefore have no interest in starting your own book club, may I direct your attention to Mead’s Your Next Five Books service instead. Happy reading.

-Molly

Adult, Horror

My Summer of Vampires

Posted on August 18, 2023August 4, 2023 by Aubrey

This summer, I bit into a Vampire Lit Class! I assumed that I would be (re)reading Dracula, but I was thankfully wrong. My professor was determined to teach from works that existed years before 1897, the year Dracula by Bram Stoker was published. I found it fascinating to learn more about vampires as plot devices, how the creatures represented fears that were in society at the time the stories were written, and about what horror as a genre can reveal about humanity. Yes, I suppose you could say I was “sucked” into this course.

Anyways…

Here’s some pre-Dracula stories you can also sink your teeth into:

The Vampyre by John William Polidori, released in 1819

Credited as the first literary vampire story! This story started with a friendly writing contest featuring friends, including renowned author Mary Shelley. (In fact, this contest also helped bring Frankenstein to the world.) The story was first published in the New Monthly Magazine, a British magazine. Finally, it was published as a novel in London in 1819.

This story follows Aubrey, a man who is tormented by former mentor Lord Ruthven. The destruction basically happens because Aubrey calls out Lord Ruthven for being promiscuous when, in reality, Lord Ruthven much worse. Lord Ruthven is *drumroll please* a vampire!

Click here to place a request for a collection of horror stories that includes The Vampyre.

The Black Vampyre, a Legend of St. Domingo by Uriah Derick d’Arcy, released in 1819

This is an American short story that was written under a pen name. It’s been unofficially given a nice handful of credits, including: the first black vampire story, the first comedy vampire story, the first vampire story written by an American author, and even the first short story that spoke against slavery.

The short story centers on Euphemia, a woman who has had much tragedy around her. Her first husband did evil deeds, her only son died, and is now in mourning for her third dead husband. Then a prince shows up looking more than love…revenge!

Click here to read the story.

Varney, the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood by J.M. Rymer, released in 1845-1847

This story was released by chapter weekly as a penny dreadful. When finally put into book format in 1847, it was 232 chapters long! This is the story that is given credit for officially having the first vampire with fangs for chompers.

This is the arguably the closest to Dracula on this list. In this, a family tries to beat Sir Francis Varney, the story’s vampire, as he tries to steal the literal life from women.

Click here to place a request for a collection of vampire stories that includes Varney, the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, released in 1872

This was first published in pieces in a London literary magazine The Dark Blue over the years of 1871-1872. The cost per issue was one shilling. Finally, it was published it its entirety in the author’s short story collection, In a Glass Darkly. Uniquely, Carmilla is written as a medical case for a doctor.

The story centers on young and lonely Laura, as she befriends and loves a young guest, Carmilla. Slowly, Laura learns that Carmila is not what she seems. “Spoiler”: Carmilla is a vampire!