kane_magus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kane_magus) wrote2018-12-08 05:14 pm
kane_magus) wrote2018-12-08 05:14 pm
Varney the Vampire
Copy/pasted from Goodreads, which was itself copy/pasted from Facebook.
Post from Goodreads:
The below is copy/pasted from a series of Facebook posts and comments I made (back in September, and again about an hour ago or so).
Initial post + comments from September 18, 2018 (edited for formatting and such):
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I have been, for the past few weeks now, reading the positively interminable Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, and I thought, tonight, that I would finally finish it. Well, as it turns out, the (thankfully free) version that I had downloaded to my Kindle from the Amazon store wasn't even the full thing. So now I have to try to find the rest of it. Rather annoying. There are versions for sale on Amazon that are not free, but... yeah, no thanks, especially considering TVTropes has a link (though I haven't tried it yet) for free, still. In any case, what I have read so far (up to just before the marriage of Flora and Charles, and the stuff with "the Baron" [who I assume for now is Varney using an alias, or else he was the dude who was killed by this baron]) has been inconsistent, unstructured, and prone to veering off into sometimes entire chapters worth of pointless tangents that have nothing whatsoever to do with the story of Varney... and yet I'm still determined to finish it.
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So, based upon what I have read of it so far, would I recommend Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood? If you're determined to read all the old "well known" vampire literature as I am (Varney apparently inspired Bram Stoker and Dracula after all) or if you are just really into reading old, obtuse, nigh impenetrable classical literature with plot holes the size of cruise ships, then maybe. Aside from that, no. No, I would not recommend Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood.
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Oh, and another reason... the dialogue.
The dialogue consists of pages upon pages upon pages of scarcely attributed quotations. It's not impossible to follow, but if you ever get mixed up, you'll probably have to go back a page or three to determine who was saying what. If someone new enters the conversation, or if the conversation involves three or more people from the start, they do a halfway decent job of indicating who is speaking, but if it's just two people talking to each other, it's just back and forth, back and forth, no attributions, no actions outside of speaking, nothing.
And roughly 99.999% of the text in Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood consists of dialogue. So... yeah. It's not the best.
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Second post from December 8, 2018 (similarly edited):
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Okay, Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. I finally finished this thing the night before last. It took me almost four months, off and on (mostly off).
Everything I said [in the copy/pasted post above] still applies (and it just got even more egregious as it went on).
After the Bannerworth section ended, there was just a long series of ever shorter episodes in which Varney tried to marry some teenage girl through some elaborate scheme (for vampire food purposes, obviously), and then failed, usually for stupid reasons. This includes the part with "the Baron" I mentioned in the above [copy/pasted] post. The Baron episode was also pretty much the end of the involvement of the Bannerworths, outside of Admiral Bell, a friend of the Bannerworth family who was introduced maybe halfway into the Bannerworth section. In a few of the earlier post-Bannerworth episodes, Varney would be foiled in the end by the recurring appearance of Admiral Bell, who'd simply show up and say something like "Hey, that's ol' Varney the Vampire! He ain't a [insert whatever Varney was pretending to be at that point in the story]." In the last section in which Admiral Bell appeared, he literally showed up out of nowhere during the last four paragraphs of that section (which was one of the somewhat longer, multiple-chapter episodes). This kind of sucks, because before all that shit, Admiral Bell had been one of the few vaguely interesting characters in the story (despite being little more than a stereotypical "crusty old seadog yarr ahoy shiver me timbers" type of character). But then he was just reduced to nothing but a running joke.
At some point later, though, Varney notes about the Bannerworths that "they are all dead," presumably due to the simple passage of time (and this would certainly apply to Bell as well, given that he was already old even during the Bannerworth section itself). And then Dr. Chillingworth from the Bannerworth section is later described by another doctor character as having died many years before that new character was even born, which indicates that decades had passed between the Bannerworth parts and most of the rest of the story, even though, aside from those minuscule tidbits, the story did a piss poor job of indicating said passage of time.
I could go into detail about each of the various episodes, and I had initially planned to just mega-spoil the entire everlasting thing with my own half-assed synopsis, but no, I'm not going to bother. Seriously, after the Bannerworth stuff, which was like half of the story, or at least a good third of it, each subsequent episode was just a variation of the same thing: Varney would show up somewhere (sometimes with the book openly acknowledging that it was Varney and Varney going by his own name, but most of the time he used a fake name or something, or the book would simply refer to him as "the stranger," like it was trying to be mysterious), he would try to marry some girl (or, in the shortest of the episodes, he'd just immediately attack a girl without bothering with the whole "try to marry her first" thing), he'd be run off (or "killed," in some cases), and then the story would just move on to the next episode. Wash, rinse, repeat about nine or ten times or so.
The story, on the whole, was very wishy-washy about whether Varney was a bad guy or not. Or, at least, it tried to be. I'll just say it straight up, though: Varney is an out and out villain. No doubt about it. Hell, even outside of the occasional "tortured over being 'forced' to find blood" crap, Varney at one point broke into a house and flat out murdered an old woman and her servant with his sword, just because he had overheard that the old woman was squirreling away a bunch of money. This had nothing whatsoever to do with him being a vampire or needing blood or whatever. He just wanted the money. So, yeah, Varney is most assuredly a villain.
Only at the very, very end was there anything even remotely resembling backstory given for Varney (aside from the bit he gave during the Bannerworth section and that pertained only to the immediate history of the Bannerworths and his involvement with them, rather than Varney's own, longer history), and it was very lackluster and not too awfully interesting. I mean, yeah, sure, it told of how he became a vampire, and also of his second "death," shortly after becoming a vampire, but... blah and meh, it didn't matter and did nothing to redeem Varney or make him much more interesting, because he was apparently a cowardly asshole even before he became a vampire.
And then, with almost no lead-up to it, except for the fact that in the very last episode, he started it off by being in one of his "oh, woe is me, I'm a vampire, and it sucks" phases and tried to drown himself in the ocean, Varney's tale ultimately ends with him going (back) to Naples and jumping into Mount Vesuvius. The End.
Would I still recommend Varney the Vampire? Well, um, I didn't really recommend it before, but... eh... ...I would say read parts of it? Maybe? The Bannerworth section was... okay, I guess, and the part that most resembled a cohesive story (if only barely). And then maybe read the following section about "Baron Stolmuyer Saltsburgh," if only because it's the first and longest of the post-Bannerworth episodes (which also continued the story of the Bannerworths and their various hangers-on for a bit longer). But then, after that, it would probably be best to just skip ahead to the end and read the episode about Lord Lake and his daughter, which leads directly into the final episode about Sir George Crofton and his daughter. These are also the only two sections of the book which even kind of touch upon the creation of new vampires. Aside from that... probably not so much. All the rest of it was just the same old thing, over and over and over again, with only slight variations.
So, yeah, that's Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood.
---
I'd just like to point out, also, that the TVTropes page for Varney the Vampire has apparently been edited by people who have not actually read the book, what with the "Vampires are Sex Gods" and "You Sexy Beast" and such tropes being applied to it, because Varney is frequently and consistently described as decidedly not attractive at all. He displayed good manners (most of the time) and was knowledgeable about a great many things, which impressed people, but he was not a physically attractive person. Pretty much all of his would be brides are either creeped out by him and have zero interest in marrying him or else have decided to marry him despite his looks because he has a lot of money (or claims to). Most of the girls were in line to marry Varney mostly because their families schemed or pressured them into doing so (due, again, to Varney's ostensible wealth and social standing, and also due to their lack of giving the slightest crap about what the girls themselves wanted or didn't want).
Also, Varney himself explicitly claimed in inner monologues at certain points to not be even remotely interested in the girls for sexual reasons, as he was simply looking for food. What the author(s) may have actually thought about the situation at the time is neither here nor there, because they portrayed Varney as a rather asexual being.
That said, I give zero shits about trying to edit the page to remove these inaccuracies. I only gave barely enough shits to make this here comment about it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/VarneyTheVampire
Post from Goodreads:
The below is copy/pasted from a series of Facebook posts and comments I made (back in September, and again about an hour ago or so).
Initial post + comments from September 18, 2018 (edited for formatting and such):
-----
I have been, for the past few weeks now, reading the positively interminable Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, and I thought, tonight, that I would finally finish it. Well, as it turns out, the (thankfully free) version that I had downloaded to my Kindle from the Amazon store wasn't even the full thing. So now I have to try to find the rest of it. Rather annoying. There are versions for sale on Amazon that are not free, but... yeah, no thanks, especially considering TVTropes has a link (though I haven't tried it yet) for free, still. In any case, what I have read so far (up to just before the marriage of Flora and Charles, and the stuff with "the Baron" [who I assume for now is Varney using an alias, or else he was the dude who was killed by this baron]) has been inconsistent, unstructured, and prone to veering off into sometimes entire chapters worth of pointless tangents that have nothing whatsoever to do with the story of Varney... and yet I'm still determined to finish it.
---
So, based upon what I have read of it so far, would I recommend Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood? If you're determined to read all the old "well known" vampire literature as I am (Varney apparently inspired Bram Stoker and Dracula after all) or if you are just really into reading old, obtuse, nigh impenetrable classical literature with plot holes the size of cruise ships, then maybe. Aside from that, no. No, I would not recommend Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood.
---
Oh, and another reason... the dialogue.
The dialogue consists of pages upon pages upon pages of scarcely attributed quotations. It's not impossible to follow, but if you ever get mixed up, you'll probably have to go back a page or three to determine who was saying what. If someone new enters the conversation, or if the conversation involves three or more people from the start, they do a halfway decent job of indicating who is speaking, but if it's just two people talking to each other, it's just back and forth, back and forth, no attributions, no actions outside of speaking, nothing.
And roughly 99.999% of the text in Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood consists of dialogue. So... yeah. It's not the best.
-----
Second post from December 8, 2018 (similarly edited):
-----
Okay, Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. I finally finished this thing the night before last. It took me almost four months, off and on (mostly off).
Everything I said [in the copy/pasted post above] still applies (and it just got even more egregious as it went on).
After the Bannerworth section ended, there was just a long series of ever shorter episodes in which Varney tried to marry some teenage girl through some elaborate scheme (for vampire food purposes, obviously), and then failed, usually for stupid reasons. This includes the part with "the Baron" I mentioned in the above [copy/pasted] post. The Baron episode was also pretty much the end of the involvement of the Bannerworths, outside of Admiral Bell, a friend of the Bannerworth family who was introduced maybe halfway into the Bannerworth section. In a few of the earlier post-Bannerworth episodes, Varney would be foiled in the end by the recurring appearance of Admiral Bell, who'd simply show up and say something like "Hey, that's ol' Varney the Vampire! He ain't a [insert whatever Varney was pretending to be at that point in the story]." In the last section in which Admiral Bell appeared, he literally showed up out of nowhere during the last four paragraphs of that section (which was one of the somewhat longer, multiple-chapter episodes). This kind of sucks, because before all that shit, Admiral Bell had been one of the few vaguely interesting characters in the story (despite being little more than a stereotypical "crusty old seadog yarr ahoy shiver me timbers" type of character). But then he was just reduced to nothing but a running joke.
At some point later, though, Varney notes about the Bannerworths that "they are all dead," presumably due to the simple passage of time (and this would certainly apply to Bell as well, given that he was already old even during the Bannerworth section itself). And then Dr. Chillingworth from the Bannerworth section is later described by another doctor character as having died many years before that new character was even born, which indicates that decades had passed between the Bannerworth parts and most of the rest of the story, even though, aside from those minuscule tidbits, the story did a piss poor job of indicating said passage of time.
I could go into detail about each of the various episodes, and I had initially planned to just mega-spoil the entire everlasting thing with my own half-assed synopsis, but no, I'm not going to bother. Seriously, after the Bannerworth stuff, which was like half of the story, or at least a good third of it, each subsequent episode was just a variation of the same thing: Varney would show up somewhere (sometimes with the book openly acknowledging that it was Varney and Varney going by his own name, but most of the time he used a fake name or something, or the book would simply refer to him as "the stranger," like it was trying to be mysterious), he would try to marry some girl (or, in the shortest of the episodes, he'd just immediately attack a girl without bothering with the whole "try to marry her first" thing), he'd be run off (or "killed," in some cases), and then the story would just move on to the next episode. Wash, rinse, repeat about nine or ten times or so.
The story, on the whole, was very wishy-washy about whether Varney was a bad guy or not. Or, at least, it tried to be. I'll just say it straight up, though: Varney is an out and out villain. No doubt about it. Hell, even outside of the occasional "tortured over being 'forced' to find blood" crap, Varney at one point broke into a house and flat out murdered an old woman and her servant with his sword, just because he had overheard that the old woman was squirreling away a bunch of money. This had nothing whatsoever to do with him being a vampire or needing blood or whatever. He just wanted the money. So, yeah, Varney is most assuredly a villain.
Only at the very, very end was there anything even remotely resembling backstory given for Varney (aside from the bit he gave during the Bannerworth section and that pertained only to the immediate history of the Bannerworths and his involvement with them, rather than Varney's own, longer history), and it was very lackluster and not too awfully interesting. I mean, yeah, sure, it told of how he became a vampire, and also of his second "death," shortly after becoming a vampire, but... blah and meh, it didn't matter and did nothing to redeem Varney or make him much more interesting, because he was apparently a cowardly asshole even before he became a vampire.
And then, with almost no lead-up to it, except for the fact that in the very last episode, he started it off by being in one of his "oh, woe is me, I'm a vampire, and it sucks" phases and tried to drown himself in the ocean, Varney's tale ultimately ends with him going (back) to Naples and jumping into Mount Vesuvius. The End.
Would I still recommend Varney the Vampire? Well, um, I didn't really recommend it before, but... eh... ...I would say read parts of it? Maybe? The Bannerworth section was... okay, I guess, and the part that most resembled a cohesive story (if only barely). And then maybe read the following section about "Baron Stolmuyer Saltsburgh," if only because it's the first and longest of the post-Bannerworth episodes (which also continued the story of the Bannerworths and their various hangers-on for a bit longer). But then, after that, it would probably be best to just skip ahead to the end and read the episode about Lord Lake and his daughter, which leads directly into the final episode about Sir George Crofton and his daughter. These are also the only two sections of the book which even kind of touch upon the creation of new vampires. Aside from that... probably not so much. All the rest of it was just the same old thing, over and over and over again, with only slight variations.
So, yeah, that's Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood.
---
I'd just like to point out, also, that the TVTropes page for Varney the Vampire has apparently been edited by people who have not actually read the book, what with the "Vampires are Sex Gods" and "You Sexy Beast" and such tropes being applied to it, because Varney is frequently and consistently described as decidedly not attractive at all. He displayed good manners (most of the time) and was knowledgeable about a great many things, which impressed people, but he was not a physically attractive person. Pretty much all of his would be brides are either creeped out by him and have zero interest in marrying him or else have decided to marry him despite his looks because he has a lot of money (or claims to). Most of the girls were in line to marry Varney mostly because their families schemed or pressured them into doing so (due, again, to Varney's ostensible wealth and social standing, and also due to their lack of giving the slightest crap about what the girls themselves wanted or didn't want).
Also, Varney himself explicitly claimed in inner monologues at certain points to not be even remotely interested in the girls for sexual reasons, as he was simply looking for food. What the author(s) may have actually thought about the situation at the time is neither here nor there, because they portrayed Varney as a rather asexual being.
That said, I give zero shits about trying to edit the page to remove these inaccuracies. I only gave barely enough shits to make this here comment about it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/VarneyTheVampire