The Bride of Christ and other fictions by Montague Summers

Sometimes the choice of what to keep was unavoidably subjective. Occasionally a few words were supplied to link passages but mostly the editing consisted of simply dropping words, phrases and chunks from the original text. What you have here are Montague Summers' own words and ideas stripped of digressions, footnotes, superfluous examples and his very detailed source references (plus commas, which he tended to sprinkle almost randomly like salt through his sentences). The thread of Summers' argument is far more coherent than a first reading suggests and his Gothic style lends itself perfectly to the subject. And very rewarding work it proved to be too. The aim was to change neither the style nor tone of the original but simply to prune it back to the basics. The text for this book has been abridged from The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, published by Kegan Paul in New York in 1928. Also something briefer to allow for illustrations. Often for pages on end it is not at all clear what tongue the book is supposed to be written in, and for the more risqué passages a more than working knowledge of French is vital.Īll this is part of Summers' charm of course, but for the purposes of this edition something more accessible was required. In tackling his books it also helps to be multilingual.

Summers was a clear writer on other themes and a very effective editor of other people's work, but when it came to vampires he tended just to follow the prompting of his own boundless curiosity. His habit of piling up examples of any passing point often obscures the drift of his argument, however fascinating the examples and anecdotes are in themselves. The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929) investigated the subject and all its ramifications in fantastic detail, presenting a record of folk beliefs about death and vampires that is unlikely to be equalled for sheer scope and depth.Įven Summers' greatest fans, however, must admit that his style is often dense and bewildering. Anyone curious about the legendary background of vampires is soon bound to stumble across Montague Summers, whose writings in the 1920s established him as the foremost authority of the time and, as it happens, ever since.

The Bride of Christ and other fictions by Montague Summers