title: Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality
author:  Paul Barber 
description: Barber has written a stimulating, authoritative discourse on the relationship between the historical concepts of vampires in folklore and fiction across the ages and throughout the world. To explain the underlying myraid interment and mourning practices designed to keep the dead at bay, he postulates a universal fear of the"vampire/revenant." Such fear was most probably based on universal lack of knowledge and control over fatal illness and disease, and misinterpretations of the natural (and varied) physical manifestations of death and decay in the human body. A lengthy bibliography accompanies the text. Best for academics, but for interested general readers too. Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred, N.Y.<br />Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  # PART ONE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # 1.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  One could hardly say that Paul Néon’s disappearance caused a stir in the
  canton of Biot, where he had apparently settled for good, nor in Les Crêts,
  the scrawny village where he inhabited the very last house.
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul collapsed on a thick bed of rotting leaves below the forestry road, along
  which he must have been staggering for some time already (ten days later,
  young Jules Reveriaz would find his scarf at the edge of the path, fifty feet
  from the place where he had fallen). Two or three dead branches cracked
  beneath his weight. When silence returned, there was a brief moment of
  vibration. The black leaves, as they were compressed, gave off a rustling
  sound like the one that water spiders alone can hear when, for example, a cat
  at the edge of a pond, after peering into the darkness for a few minutes,
  immobile, his neck outstretched, lies down upon the moss. It was ten o’clock
  at night. A blurred crescent moon gave