The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo

WARNING! Contains moderate bloody violence against slavers and plantation owners! This pioneer vampire tale from 1819 spills revenge-cold blood as its narrator leads us through high gothic terror, to radical outrage, to in-jokes for the New York literati and broadsides on the morality of slavery, reaching a blood-soaked conclusion dripping with 'biting' polemic vilifying the bankers who caused the horrendous economic recession of that same year. An anti-capitalist horror fable from 200 years hence, The Black Vampyre vilified the worst financial predation the capitalist world would ever see, decades before Karl Marx ― the enslavement of Africans in the New World. One dead man said no. And this is his story. The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo tells the affrighting tale of a slave who is resurrected as a vampire after being killed by his owner; the slave seeks revenge by stealing the owner's son and marrying the owner's wife. The anonymous writer D'Arcy sets the story against the conditions that led to the Haitian Revolution. First published in chapbook form in New York in 1819, this is its first time ever in paperback. This emancipatory tale from literary New York in the 1810s arguably dates the birth of horror as know it! This edition features a new introduction as well as extensive notes and a guide to literary allusions.

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