Knightshade

by Paul Féval père

In the middle of the Great Hungarian Plain, there are two graves. Each is covered by a black stone, which carry inscriptions in French. On the larger one: Jean T?n?bre, Chevalier; on the smaller: Ange T?n?bre, Priest. They are the T?n?bre brothers... On many occasions, during the last four hundred years, those graves have opened, to the terror and the horror of the surrounding country... "The brothers T?n?bre are the Eternal Adversaries against which Eternal Champions and Thousand-Faced Heroes are pitched."-Brian Stableford. Paul F?val (1816-1887) was the author of numerous popular swashbuckling novels and one of the fathers of the modern crime thriller. Brian Stableford has published more than fifty novels and two hundred short stories. Knightshade was written in 1860-almost forty years before Bram Stoker's Dracula-and is one of three classic vampire stories also available from Black Coat Press.

Genres: Vampires, Classics, Horror, Fiction, Speculative Fiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1860

About the author

For works by this author's son, please see: Paul Féval fils.

Paul Henri Corentin Féval, père, (1816-1887) was the author of popular swashbucklers, such as Le Loup Blanc (1843) and the perennial best seller Le Bossu (1857). He also penned the seminal Knightshade, The Vampire Countess and Vampire City. His greatest claim to fame was as one of the fathers of the modern crime thriller. Because of its themes and characters, his novel Jean Diable (1862) can claim to be the world's first modern detective novel. His masterpiece was Les Habits Noirs (1863-75), a criminal saga written over a twelve year period comprised of seven novels. After losing his fortune in a financial scandal, Féval became a born again Christian, stopped writing crime thrillers, and began to write religious novels, sadly leaving the tale of the Black Coats uncompleted.

Reviews

[Tulpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many early works of genre fiction, this one benefits from the oddness and audacity contained within. A short serialized fiction in which the two protagonists may or may not be vampires, con artists, neither or both telling a story about con artists telling a story about vampires. Funny and digressive, filled with impossibilities. Nonetheless, to focus on these narrative impossibilities is, as the titular Chevalier Tenebre said, the protestation of minds too narrow against truths too broad. Featured within is a narrative thinning of the fantastic, such that just before the end the vampires central to the story have been reduced to desperate and common thieves only for the last pages to reverse this, reinvesting the fantastic back into the world.

[Peter]

Great fun!

[Rankin]

Ch 72
“We reached out for heaven and found it stuffed with stern guards and shooting stars.”

[Sean O'Hara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man, would you look at that cover. Doesn't it look so surreal and creepy? Doesn't it just scream, "This book is frickin' weird!"? Doesn't it make you expect something like City of Lost Children or Dark City?

Yeah, well, you won't get it. The book is a caper story. The creepy stuff only appears briefly, in flashback, at the beginning and may not even be real, and then again as a twist at the end. In between, it's just the Parisian upper class at a party where the police believe a pair of thieves will strike, and the growing suspicions about who the thieves might be disguised as. SPOILER: It's exactly who you think it is.

It's not that this is a bad book (though it's not a great one either), but I would've enjoyed it a lot more if I'd gone in thinking it was an early precursor to Fantômas (which it surely is) instead of Dracula.

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two evil, and scheming brothers, that are most likely cursed immortals and may be either vampires, ghosts or demons attempt to seduce, swindle and steal their way through French society in a variety of disguises.

Interesting ideas, but the heroes are all very flat and the Brothers just seem evil, for evil's sake.

For this to work, the villains needed to go up against heroes as strong as they are written.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ce livre contient une histoire de vol et meurtre assez bien ménée. En plus il y a un regard moqueur sur les milieux légitimistes du séconde empire et des interventions de vampire. Ce qui manqué à ce roman, c'est une raison valable de lire. Il est un d'une insignificance à vous couper le soufflé. Féval ne compte pas parmi les grands écrivains francais mais il est capable de faire mieux que celui-ci.