A Bloody Scandal

Those bloodsucking fiends at Harper's have evidently got wind of my cunning plan to undercut the sales of their inch-thick gimmick, Dracula the Un-Dead, by publishing a vampire story of my own. The gimmick, as written by a great-grandnephew and a "renowned screenwriter", was scheduled for publication on 24 September, but is in stock at Amazon now and has already attained fifty-second place in the "Classic Horror" category. Although this places it behind a volume of Bulldog Drummond, and well to the rear of two renowned gobs of pulp by Dennis Wheatley, it is considerably ahead of Dracula's Guest, a very serviceable collection by the real Stoker; not to mention Graphic Classics: Horror Classics Volume 10, an anthology of comic-book ripoffs of real stories, in whose company Dracula the Un-Dead doubtless best belongs. Meditate, if you will, on the outrageousness of all this; and consider, as a pendant to that thought, the literary scandal that vampire novels set on fifteenth-century space expeditions are, as yet, so few and far between.