Publisher's Synopsis
Robert Louis Stevenson's vampire novella 'Olalla' is one of the great overlooked works of 19th century Gothic fiction. Published as a Christmas ghost story in 1885 (a year after 'The Body Snatcher' and a few months before The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) it has been patronised and underrated by most commentators - not least by its own author. In his 1888 essay 'A Chapter on Dreams', Stevenson dismisses 'Olalla' as a 'not very defensible story'2 in which he struggled to fit his original vision-which took the form of a dream-into the framework of a conventional narrative. Damning of his own efforts, and of his (admittedly weak) ending in particular, Stevenson consigned his story to more than a century of neglect by critics and readers. Strangely enough, 'Olalla' has benefited but little from the obsession with all things vampiric that marks our era of Twilight and True Blood. A far more turgid and uneven piece of prose, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is pored over today with a reverence that is normally reserved for Holy Writ. The soft-core lesbian bloodsucking of Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' (1877) has won a new and appreciative audience among feminist scholars. Meanwhile, a genuinely artful and ambiguous work like 'Olalla' is left to languish unread on the back pages of a few Stevenson anthologies.
