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    Vampires of the Desert (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Vampires of the Desert (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Vampires of the Desert (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Ebook65 pages45 minutes

    Vampires of the Desert (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

    By A. Hyatt Verrill

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    About this ebook

    This early work by A. Hyatt Verrill was originally published in 1929 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'Vampires of the Desert' is a short story about a paleontologist that discovers an mysterious ancient creature that was sucking the blood from its victims. Alpheus Hyatt Verrill was born in 1871. A graduate of Yale University, he wrote on a variety of topics, ranging from natural history and whaling to juvenile adventures and science fiction. Over the course of his career, he produced some 115 books. However, he was probably best known the travelogues he penned while exploring the Americas and the Caribbean. The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateFeb 17, 2015
    ISBN9781473399235
    Vampires of the Desert (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

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      Book preview

      Vampires of the Desert (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) - A. Hyatt Verrill

      Vampires of the Desert

      By A. Hyatt Verrill

      A Cryptofiction Classic

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      Introduction

      The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

      Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden – cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

      Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea monster – the 1890s saw an explosion of cryptofictional short stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s A Matter of Fact (1892) and H. G. Wells’ The Sea Raiders (1896). Into the 20th-century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) centred on an expedition to a plateau of the Amazon basin where prehistoric animals continued to thrive, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924) picked up a similar theme, featuring not just dinosaurs but also Neanderthals. Less than a decade later, a prehistoric ape took centre stage in the 1933 film King Kong.

      The fifties witnessed what was probably the heyday of cryptozoology. It was in 1955 that Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans – known as the father of cryptozoology – published his On the Track of Unknown Animals, in which he both coined the field’s name and mapped out its intellectual boundaries. Four years later, Willy Ley’s popular Exotic Zoology (1959) was published, featuring discussion of the Yeti and sea serpents. To modern cryptozoology enthusiasts, these works are still seen as the subject’s defining texts.

      While the popularity of cryptozoology has surely waned since the fifties – perhaps mainly due to the the ongoing non-discovery of creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster – cryptofiction may well be more popular than ever. The towering cryptofiction text of the modern era is undoubtedly Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. It was Crichton’s book which helped trigger a renaissance in cryptofiction, which saw the publication of works such as John Darnton’s Neanderthal (1996), Phillip Kerr’s Esau (1996), Frank E. Peretti’s Monster (2006), and Steve Alten’s Meg series. 2005 even saw a $207 million remake of the original cryptofiction movie, King Kong.

      Ultimately, then, despite its obscured and messy roots, the genre of cryptofiction may just be more alive than ever. One wonders why this is: perhaps it stems from an attempt to inject some mystery and wonder back into a natural world that is largely discovered and pacified; perhaps it has to do with modern readers being more sympathetic to creatures that at least have some vague basis in scientific fact. Whatever the reason, cryptofiction is here to stay, and the stories in this collection map the development of a genre which is as strange as it is fascinating.

      Vampires of the Desert

      by A. Hyatt Verrill

      When I sailed for Peru, to accept a position as field paleontologist for the International Petroleum Company at their oil fields near Talara, I little dreamed what amazing experiences and astounding adventures were in store for me.

      The life of a paleontologist is not, as a rule, an exciting or adventurous one. In fact, there is scarcely a branch of scientific field work that promises so little in the way of adventure, peril or thrills. Fossils, interesting as they may be to the trained scientist who studies them, are not what one might call dangerous game. Neither are they elusive, shy nor suspicious of human beings. And, aside from the ordinary and to-be-expected hardships of camp life and field work, hunting fossils is perhaps the safest and tamest of professions. And as I was to hunt and study the smallest and most abundant of fossils — namely, diatoms and foraminifera — for the presence of certain species of these minute fossil animals is known to have a very direct bearing upon petroleum deposits, and as my hunting ground was in the open desert where there were neither wild animals nor wild men, and

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