The Vampire-His Kith and Kin

Montague Summers' The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) is one of the earliest-and still one of the most wide-ranging-English-language studies of vampire belief. Summers treats "the vampire" as a comparative subject rather than a single fictional stereotype, gathering traditions of the dangerous dead, tracing how different societies explained vampirism and its causes, describing characteristic signs and customary protections, and setting European material beside parallels from earlier and wider horizons, including the ancient Near East. The book closes by following the vampire into modern literature, showing how folklore, report, and imagination became entangled. This Serpent Books edition is a clean facsimile reprint of the 1928 volume, prepared from newly scanned pages and manually restored for consistent readability. It includes a brief Editor's Note by Nikolas Århem. Companion volumes in this Montague Summers line include The Vampire in Europe and The Werewolf-A Study in Myth, Folklore, and Fear (Serpent Library Classics).