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    Burial of Rats: Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection
    Burial of Rats: Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection
    Burial of Rats: Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection
    Ebook42 pages38 minutes

    Burial of Rats: Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection

    By Bram Stoker and Varla Ventura

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    About this ebook

    Varla Ventura, fan favorite on Huffington Post’s Weird News, frequent guest on Coast to Coast, and bestselling author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces a new Weiser Books Collection of forgotten crypto-classics. Magical Creatures is a hair-raising herd of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s affectionate and unerring eye for the fantastic.

    Bram Stoker, the master of horror and dark mind behind the most famous vampire novel in history—Dracula—brings us to the edge of our chairs again with a tale of a different variety. Here the horrors are not vampires, nor are they werewolves. Here the horrors are poverty and vicious, snarling rats. A young man finds himself (foolishly) wandering beyond the city walls of 1850s Paris, making his way into the dust piles and garbage gatherings of the paupers. Living among the rags and the war-torn are giant, beady eyed rats. Hideous beasts that clean a dead (or dying) human body down to its skeleton before the flesh is even cold.

    Add to that a swampy quagmire and some curious psychic insights, and you have a masterful tale of the macabre that is not for the feint of heart.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Wheel Weiser
    Release dateFeb 10, 2012
    ISBN9781619400399
    Burial of Rats: Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection
    Author

    Bram Stoker

    Bram Stoker (1847–1912) grew up in Ireland listening to his mother's tales of blood-drinking fairies and vampires rising from their graves. He later managed the Lyceum Theatre in London and worked as a civil servant, newspaper editor, reporter, and theater critic. Dracula, his best-known work, was published in 1897 and is hailed as one of the founding pieces of Gothic literature.  

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      Book preview

      Burial of Rats - Bram Stoker

      The Burial of the Rats

      Bram Stoker

      Varla Ventura

      Magical Creatures

      A Weiser Books Collection

      This ebook edition first published in 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.

      With offices at:

      665 Third Street, Suite 400

      San Francisco, CA 94107

      www.redwheelweiser.com

      Copyright © 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser LLC. All rights reserved.

      Excerpted from Stoker, Bram. Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories. London: G. Routledge, 1914.

      eISBN: 978-1-61940-039-9

      Cover design by Jim Warner

      Rat-Trap

      Imagine yourself wandering alone in Paris in the 1850s, heartsick for your own true love. You are distracted by this separation and end up farther and farther afield until you are in the land of the pauper: the dusty piles and rat-infested encampments of the poorest of the poor. Living among the rags and the war-torn are giant, beady-eyed rats. Hideous beasts that can clean a dead (or dying) body down to its skeleton before the flesh is even cold. Add to that a swampy quagmire, some curious intuitions, and a terrifying chase, and you have a masterful tale of the macabre that is not for the faint of heart.

      If you have a fear of mice or rats, you will want to stop right here. Do not read any further. The harsh reality and realism within this short story are enough to haunt not only your dreams but your daily waking life. Every scurrying in the corner of a room, each passing shadow, will seem like the moves of a tiny rodent-beast, patiently watching—waiting for you to show your weakness, waiting for you to trip and lay helpless, waiting for you to fall under its teeth.

      Bram Stoker's The Burial of the Rats was one of several shorter works published posthumously in 1914 by his widow, Florence. In her preface to the original collection, she writes:

      A few months before the lamented death of my husband—I might say even as the shadow of death was over him—he planned three series of short stories for publication, and the present volume is one of them. To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband's most remarkable work. The other stories have already been published in English and American periodicals. Had my husband lived longer, he might have seen fit to revise this work, which is mainly from the earlier years of his strenuous life. But, as fate has entrusted to me the issuing of it, I consider it fitting and proper to let it go forth practically as it was left by him.

      ~FLORENCE BRAM STOKER

      Her love for him and his works comes across in this preface, just as I hope my ardor for the macabre comes across to you when you read this wonderful short story, the second of many of Stoker's lesser known works to be published in the Magical Creatures collection. This is not a tale of vampires or werewolves but rather a more terrifying creature: one that lives and thrives in every city, in

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