Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood is a
Victorian era serialized
gothic horror story by
James Malcolm Rymer and
Thomas Peckett Prest. It first appeared in 1845–47 as a series of cheap
pamphlets of the kind then known as "
penny dreadfuls". The story was published in book form in 1847. It is of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages divided into 220 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words. Despite its inconsistencies,
Varney the Vampire is more or less a cohesive whole. It is the tale of the
vampire Sir Francis Varney, and introduced many of the
tropes present in
vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences.