Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories ($1.99), by Michael Sims, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day.Book Description
Before Twilight and True Blood, even before Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula.
Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the Victorian era-from England, America, France, Germany, Transylvania, and even Japan-into a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" to Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne." Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stoker's own "Dracula's Guest"-a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.
Vampires captivated the Victorians, as Sims reveals in his insightful introduction: In 1867, Karl Marx described capitalism as "dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor"; while in 1888 a London newspaper invoked vampires in trying to explain Jack the Ripper's predations. At a time when vampires have been re-created in a modern context, Dracula's Guest will remind readers young, old, and in between of why the undead won't let go of our imagination.
The Child Inside ($1.56 / £0.99 UK), by Suzanne Bugler, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (no US edition).Book Description
When Rachel’s unborn baby dies, she and her husband Andrew focus upon their precious only son. Their dormant, silently-felt grief is slowly destroying their marriage and as Jono grows up and pulls away from them, Rachel finds herself to be resentful, lonely and without purpose. A chance encounter brings her into contact with an old woman whom she believes to be the mother of a friend who died as a teenager. But the woman denies that she ever even had a daughter, and wants nothing to do with Rachel. This friend - Vanessa - was adored, vibrant and exciting. Rachel is convinced the woman is Vanessa’s mother, but how can she be sure? How could anyone deny the existence if their own child? There are frightening parallels with Rachel’s own loss, and she cannot let it go. In desperation, Rachel tracks down Vanessa’s brother, Simon, and slowly the two of them get drawn into a dangerous and destructive relationship…
The Pact ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), by Jodi Picoult, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle.Book Description
From Jodi Picoult, one of the most powerful writers in contemporary fiction, comes a riveting, timely, heartbreaking, and terrifying novel of families in anguish -- and friendships ripped apart by inconceivable violence. Until the phone calls came at 3:00 A.M. on a November morning, the Golds and their neighbors, the Hartes, had been inseparable. It was no surprise to anyone when their teenage children, Chris and Emily, began showing signs that their relationship was moving beyond that of lifelong friends. But now seventeen-year-old Emily has been shot to death by her beloved and devoted Chris as part of an apparent suicide pact -- leaving two devastated families stranded in the dark and dense predawn, desperate for answers about an unthinkable act and the children they never really knew.
