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Books So Bad They're Good: Nazi Vampires, Anyone? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-05

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I have never much liked horror movies.

I’ve seen some, of course – it’s all but impossible to avoid them, especially if one grew up during the 1970s – but rarely on purpose and never with much enjoyment. The bad ones annoy me, the good ones scare me to the point where I can’t sleep, and the really gory ones make me flee the screening room before I am literally sick on the spot.

There are exceptions, of course. Hangover Square, the Laird Cregar vehicle about a composer who goes mad when he hears certain sounds, was both terrifying and memorable, plus the score was wonderful. The original Dracula is genuinely scary, ditto James Whale’s version of Frankenstein, and the adaptations of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist are masterpieces, period. I’ve even enjoyed movies that aren’t actually horror movies that still have horror elements (see: the dream ballet sequence in The Red Shoes, especially if you’re a woman).

And then there was the original zombie movie, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

For those who aren’t familiar with Romero or his work, he was by the far the most influential director to work in and around Pittsburgh. I’m not being sarcastic, either – Romero, though born in New York, spent his most productive years in Western Pennsylvania. Most of his films are horror to one degree or another (see: Dawn of the Dead, which was largely filmed in Monroeville Mall), but he also directed Knightriders, a cult classic about a group of medieval reenactors who joust on motorcycles. It was reportedly inspired by Romero hearing about the Pennsic War, the great SCA event north of Pittsburgh, and it’s oddly endearing despite a minuscule budget and unusual premise.

My introduction to Romero and his films came courtesy of a special late night broadcast of Night of the Living Dead. Like most major cities back before cable, Pittsburgh had a Saturday night horror host, Bill Cardille, whose day job was as a host/voiceover artist/occasional anchor on WIIC/WPXI, the local NBC affiliate. Cardille, known around town as “Chilly Billy,” was unusually knowledgeable about horror and science fiction cinema, and though he introduced films on the traditional dungeon set, he refused to dress up as as a vampire, pretend to drink blood, or attempt to imitate Vincent Price. He actually took the films seriously, no matter how ridiculous, and was a respected part of Pittsburgh life and culture until his death in 2016.

That was one of the reasons I decided to stay up late one summer night and watch his special presentation of Night of the Living Dead.

I was staying over at my aunt’s house, in the bedroom she’d converted to a TV room/guest room with a sleeper sofa. I was around sixteen or seventeen, and had become enough of a fangirl that I was genuinely psyched to watch what all the critics and fan writers agreed was a genuine classic. The broadcast was scheduled for 1:00 am, when my uncles and aunt would be in bed, and I knew that if I turned out the light, kept the volume low, and sat right in front of the TV, I could watch whatever I wanted without fear of interruption by meddling adults.

So I brushed my teeth, turned out the light, and turned on the TV, prepared to be pleasantly scared by a local boy made good.

I didn’t even last fifteen minutes.

I’m not sure precisely why the movie scared me so badly. Night of the Living Dead was filmed in and around a local cemetery and a single house, with a cast of local actors and a budget so low that the “blood” was reportedly Hershey’s Chocolate syrup because Romero couldn’t afford professional-grade makeup. The cinematography was grainy, the premise was nearly clearly explained, and the lurching gait of the zombies who suddenly toddle out of a cemetery made them look slightly drunk. It was a cheaply made grade-Z horror movie like the ones I’d laughed at on Saturday mornings while my mother was in grad school and I was home by myself -

Except that somehow, some way, this one was genuinely frightening, on a bone-deep level that left me buried under the blankets, shaking at the thought that the zombies might come crashing through the picture window in my aunt’s living room, burst through the TV room door, and slaughter us all in our beds.

I did my best to sleep late the next day, but I was not precisely alert or coherent when my aunt, exasperated, finally forced me to get up, get dressed, and have breakfast so we could go antiquing in the countryside. I may have fallen asleep in the back seat of my uncle’s car but at this point I’m not exactly sure. But I do know that it was a good fifteen years before I voluntarily watched a horror movie again, and the sole reason I got through that was because it was a faintly ridiculous one with Julian Sands playing a sexy blond warlock, with nary a zombie or a bottle of Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup in sight.

Needless to say, I don’t read horror stories very often. I’ve read some, of course, but most of those are Victorian/Edwardian classics or the occasional Cthulhu mythos thriller, not modern blood-guts-and-intestines gore fests. Some of these hold up surprisingly well, and I confess to a sneaking fondness for Katherine Kurtz’s Adept series, a loving homage to those old school gentleman occultist thrillers of the pre-war period. I also enjoy Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer stories, beautifully written tales set in Appalachian that draw on local folklore for their plots and characters.

Then there are the vampires, both literary and historical.

By this I do not necessarily mean Anne Rice and her sexy, whiny, hyper-annoying bloodsuckers. The only book of hers I ever managed to get through was Cry to Heaven, a strange historical novel about an involuntarily castrated opera singer who spends his entire career plotting vengeance against the guy who had him gelded to steal his family fortune, and if you want to read my take on that, well, here we go.

No, I mean real vampires. Dracula is still one of the most genuinely chilling books I’ve ever read, with memorable characters and a final chase sequence that will haunt your dreams. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla is equally frightening, with a lush, hothouse quality to the prose and the plot that seduces the reader nearly as deftly as Carmilla seduces her young victim. John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting not only portrays vampirism as a chronic disease, not a curse from God, but uses it to solve one of the greatest mysteries of the Middle Ages. Even Sookie Stackhouse and her non-whiny but still sexy vampire boyfriends in True Blood and its sequels can be entertaining if not deep.

I also have a taste for books about historical vampires, or those accused of vampirism. Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally’s book about the origins of the Dracula legend and the life of Vlad Tespes is pretty outdated by now, but it’s still a fun read. Ditto Florescu’s book on the possible historical and literary antecedents to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, particularly the sections about the alchemist Dippel and the actual Frankenstein family.

There are even books about vampires in New England, which was something of a shock; New England is far more ethnically diverse than most people realize, but it’s never been the magnet for central Europeans that Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago were in the heyday of heavy industry. New England’s cold climate and wet winters were perfect breeding grounds for tuberculosis, however, which is almost certainly what killed the “vampires” who crop up occasionally in local folklore.

And then there’s tonight’s selection from the wilds of Badbookistan. Utterly ridiculous, vaguely reminiscent of Carmilla and other much better books, it was one of the very first examples of a type of vampire that has become wildly popular in fanfiction, if not necessarily on the shelves of the nearest Little Louie’s Discount Book Barn and Lightly Used Literature Emporium: the sexy homoerotic soulsucking vampire:

The House of the Vampire, by George Sylvester Viereck – I first learned of this lushly ludicrous book in Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel, a history of mid-century American fascism. Maddow herself, who is a terrific TV host and a gifted podcaster, was far more interested in Viereck’s non-literary endeavors than his writing, and it’s not hard to see why. Viereck, descended from German nobility thanks to a fling one of his grandmothers had with a Hohenzollern princeling, was raised in America, became a Wilhelmine propagandist during the Great War, became a journalist in the 1920s, and then spent the 1930s and early 1940s shilling for the Nazis and trying to overthrow the American government. He spent time in a federal penitentiary, wrote a prison memoir, and eventually died in what is now Holyoke Medical Center, about ten minutes from my front door.

And oh yeah, one of his buddies during the 1920s was, my hand to God, Nikola Tesla.

Yes. Really.

Little about Viereck’s early years hinted that he would live such a...colorful life. His parents were cousins, true, but his non-princeling grandfather was a German revolutionary who’d fled to America after the Revolution of 1848. Born in Germany, the future author was an unusually precocious writer who began writing poetry early. He went to college in New York, where he began writing what was then politely known as “Uranian poetry” about the delights of the deep, close, not-at-all-erotic relationships that spring up between lovely young men who are the very best of friends.

If this sounds like something straight out of E.M. Forster, **ding ding ding** we have a winner! “Uranian” was a polite term for what we would now call “homoerotic” or “gay,” and though I haven’t managed to find any evidence that Viereck was actually having sex with his schoolmates, his first poetry collection, Nineveh and Other Poems, sure did give that impression. It also got great reviews – no less than The Saturday Review dubbed him "the most widely-discussed young literary man in the United States today," which is impressive today and was basically career-making in 1907.

Viereck promptly followed up Nineveh and Other Poems with a collection of plays, then published The House of the Vampire (of which more below). A collection of his journalism, Confessions of a Barbarian, quickly followed, then a short-lived magazine that boasted contributions from, of all people, British occultist and libertine Aleister Crowley. What Crowley thought of Viereck is not known, but given that he’d engaged in ritual magic and occult duels with future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats a few years earlier, he might well have seen Viereck more as a source of money than the most widely-discussed young literary man in America.

So far Viereck could have any young literary man...and then came the Great War, and what promised to be a fine career sank beneath the foamy foam. This is not a metaphor, either; Viereck, who’d become an ardent supporter of the Central Powers, basically wrecked his own career by working as a low-grade German agent, writing propaganda and feeding information about the United States to the Kaiser’s government. He capped this with a spectacularly ill-timed defense of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and to say that he was given the cut direct by his fellow authors is putting it mildly. He was expelled from basically every society that had welcomed him, accused of writing propaganda after an American agent found incriminating documents in a briefcase he’d left on a train, and was nearly lynched by an enraged mob in 1918.

He even got an angry letter from Theodore Roosevelt, an acquaintance of his father, who basically ordered him to move to Germany and never come back.

Needless to say, Viereck found it hard to get work for the next few years, and little wonder; being expelled from the Poetry Society was one thing, but incurring the wrath of Teddy Roosevelt was not precisely a good career move. It’s something of a miracle that he wasn’t arrested as a spy and expelled from the United States as an undesirable alien.

As questionable as his loyalties might have been, Viereck was both talented and determined. He managed to rebuild his career, this time as a popular journalist. By the mid-1920s he was a fixture on the European correspondent circuit, writing profiles of well-known politicians, writers, scientists, and minor royalty. He even interviewed Adolf Hitler during that heady time, dubbing him a “human explosive,” and becoming an ardent admirer of the dashing young revolutionary/future Fuehrer.

This is also the time when Viereck, whose circle of friends was the dictionary definition of “expansive,” became good buddies with Nikola Tesla, whom he invited to dine with him and his wife. He dedicated at least one poem to Tesla, whom he seems to have regarded as something of a genius (spoiler: he wasn’t wrong, at least about that).

Alas for Viereck, he once again derailed what looked fair to be a literary comeback. His admiration for Hitler morphed into full-blown Nazism, and by the early 1930s he was giving speeches and writing articles about the glories of the Thousand Year Reich. His Jewish friends, appalled, promptly dubbed him “George Swastika Viereck” and avoided him the way professional cooks avoided Typhoid Mary, but he would not be stopped. Viereck was so convinced of the rightness of the Nazi cause, and the glory of German might, that by the 1940s he was literally funneling German propaganda (and large sums of money) to sympathetic members of Congress. The politicians, who included Republican stalwart Hamilton Fish (who’d known Teddy Roosevelt and his nephew-in-law Franklin) and future possible assassination victim Ernest Lundeen, then had the propaganda read into the Congressional Record under the guise of giving floor speeches. They even let Viereck use their Congressional franking privileges to send out whole forests’ worth of Nazi literature to their constituents, which is one of those breathtakingly audacious plans that shouldn’t have worked but did.

There’s a great deal more about Viereck’s war career, and that of his fellow fifth columnists, in Prequel, and if you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest that you do so post-haste; if nothing else, the parts about Ernest Lundeen, who died under extremely suspicious circumstances, all but beg to be part of a true crime podcast. Ditto future architect Philip Johnson, whose fans and biographers are still trying to explain away his support for isolationism, Nazism, and similar extremely nasty things to this day.

As for Viereck, suffice to say that Viereck’s wartime career did not end well despite his enormous Rolodex and previous literary success, unless one defines “well” as “being convicted of federal crimes, spending several years as an involuntary guest of the United States government in the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, penitentiary, and writing a prison memoir with detailed descriptions of situational sexual activity that is not nearly as erotic as one’s earlier Uranian poetry might lead one to believe.”

Viereck got out of the slammer in the early 1950s, and spent the last decade of his life living with his son, poet and Mount Holyoke professor Peter Viereck. This is almost certainly why he breathed his last in what is now Holyoke Medical Center, although why his son took him there during his last illness instead of the teaching hospital in Springfield is not clear.

As for The House of the Vampire...to say that it’s basically an homage/ripoff of Oscar Wilde is putting it mildly. Critics at the time noticed that it was, erm, influenced by the gay-but-not-really subtext of The Importance of Being Earnest, and it’s not hard to see why; the “vampire,” one Reginald Clark, originally seems to the mentor/patron to a group of much younger writers and artists, but one by one, they all seem to lose their creative spark as they become close to him (just like Dorian Gray’s relationship with basically every woman he meets drains her dry and either ruins or kills her).

There’s even a character named “Ernest,” a hapless young writer whose writer’s block is permanently cured when Reginald first befriends him, then starts feeding on him, then finally drains him dry. For it seems that Reginald, like other Great Men such as Napoleon, firmly believes that the secret to success is sucking out the creativity, originality, and pretty much everything contained in every single ganglion to fuel his own brilliance and life force.

Now, this is a genuinely horrifying idea, and it’s not hard to see the parallels with Viereck’s later adoration of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cult. But the ending of the book is so overblown, and so ridiculous, as to earn it a spot in Badbookistan just on its own:

The Princess With the Yellow Veil appeared ... flitted across the room and melted away. She was followed by childhood memories ... girls' heads, boys' faces.... He saw his dead mother waving her arms to him.... An expression of death-agony distorted the placid features.... Then, throwing a kiss to him, she, too, disappeared. Picture on picture followed.... Words of love that he had spoken ... sins, virtues, magnanimities, meannesses, terrors ... mathematical formulas even, and snatches of songs. Leontina came and was swallowed up.... No, it was Ethel who was trying to speak to him ... trying to warn.... She waved her hands in frantic despair.... She was gone.... A pale face ... dark, dishevelled hair.... Jack.... How he had changed! He was in the circle of the vampire's transforming might. "Jack," he cried. Surely Jack had something to explain ... something to tell him ... some word that if spoken would bring rest to his soul. He saw the words rise to the boy's lips, but before he had time to utter them his image also had vanished. And Reginald ... Reginald, too, was gone.... There was only the mighty brain ... panting ... whirling.... Then there was nothing.... The annihilation of Ernest Fielding was complete. Vacantly he stared at the walls, at the room and at his master. The latter was wiping the sweat from his forehead. He breathed deeply.... The flush of youth spread over his features.... His eyes sparkled with a new and dangerous brilliancy.... He took the thing that had once been Ernest Fielding by the hand and led it to its room. XXXI With the first flush of the morning Ethel appeared at the door of the house on Riverside Drive. She had not heard from Ernest, and had been unable to obtain connection with him at the telephone. Anxiety had hastened her steps. She brushed against Jack, who was also directing his steps to the abode of Reginald Clarke. At the same time something that resembled Ernest Fielding passed from the house of the Vampire. It was a dull and brutish thing, hideously transformed, without a vestige of mind. "Mr. Fielding," cried Ethel, beside herself with fear as she saw him descending. "Ernest!" Jack gasped, no less startled at the change in his friend's appearance. Ernest's head followed the source of the sound, but no spark of recognition illumined the deadness of his eyes. Without a present and without a past ... blindly ... a gibbering idiot ... he stumbled down the stairs.

Need I say more?

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Have you ever read George Sylvester Viereck’s poetry? His prison memoir? Rachel Maddow’s Prequel? Listened to one of her podcasts? Bought a psychic vampire book and then regretted it? Bought a psychic vampire book and not regretted? Nearly wet yourself at a midnight showing of a George Romero movie? It’s a surprisingly pleasant night in Massachusetts, just over the mountain from Holyoke Medical Center, so pour yourself a tall glass of your favorite tipple and share….

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