Wake Not the Dead!: Continental Tales of Terror

A terrifying female vampire who can destroy cities … a medieval sorcerer and his captive un-dead bride … a sinister hag who uses hypnosis to lure men into committing suicide … a love-charm that requires the ritual sacrifice of an innocent … faceless creatures in the treetops broadcasting fear in order to to conceal a village of elves … a parallel world of immortal fairies, luring mortal children to be their playmates … the secret orgies of nocturnal goblins … bandits and brigands, cut-throats, dwarfs and hunchbacks. This is the world of 19th-century German and French weird tales.In Wake Not the Dead!, Brett Rutherford has adapted, revised, and expanded eight tales and one novella by the Germans Ernst Raupach and Ludwig Tieck, and the French writing duo Erckmann-Chatrian. In this literary experiment, the earliest English translations of these stories are modernized and sometimes expanded and embellished. Although the additions are new, the period style of the writings is maintained. As a literary entertainment, think of these as re-told classics as they might have been adapted for 1970s Hammer Horror films. Contents include Ernst Raupach’s “Wake Not the Dead!”, which anticipates Stoker’s Dracula; Ludwig Tieck’s “Pietro of Abano” (basis of an opera by Louis Spohr and a long poem by Robert Browning), “And Never to Part,” “Tannenhaüser,” (the basis for Wagner’s opera Tannhaüser), “The Elves,” “The Goblet,” and “The Price of Love,”; and Erckmann-Chatrian’s “The Eye Invisible,” and “The Child-Stealer.”

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