FICTION

VAMPIRES: TWO CENTURIES OF GREAT VAMPIRE STORIES, edited by Alan Ryan (Doubleday: $15.95; 621 pp.). “Have you never heard of strange and dreadful beings who never die? . . . of--of--I dread to pronounce the word . . . a vampyre!”

This question, posed in all its hyphenated horror, is from the 1845 novel, “Varney the Vampire.” By the time the reader has completed this huge collection, he will rival the venerable Prof. Van Helsing’s arcane knowledge of the undead.

Alan Ryan has arranged the stories chronologically, and the early pre-Dracula tales are charmingly naive. The modern reader, accustomed to a plethora of mass murderers, must adopt a willing suspension of blase sophistication.

The later writers search to vary the standard vampire theme. After all, there are only so many ways to hammer a stake through the heart or for a body to dissolve into dust.

Fortunately, Ryan has unearthed some of the very best tales in the genre, including some that can only be tangentially classified as vampiric.

Here are Le Fanu’s classic, “Carmilla,” a haunting novella entwining blood lust with lesbian eroticism; E. F. Benson’s seldom reprinted “The Room in the Tower,” perhaps the most frightening nightmare tale ever written, and Richard Mattheson’s “Drink My Blood,” an unmercifully disturbing portrait of an ostracized boy who seeks acceptance anywhere he can.

“Vampires” may be the definitive treasury of things that go “slurp” in the night.