Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood is a Victorian-era serialized gothic horror story variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls". The author was paid by the typeset line, so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.
Cover from one of the original publications.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
The ruins of Wolf's Crag castle in Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)
Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the "Gothic Revival" style, built by Gothic writer Horace Walpole
The Gothic Temple folly in the gardens at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, UK, built as a ruin in 1741, designed by James Gibbs
Catherine Morland, the naive protagonist of Northanger Abbey (1818), Jane Austen's Gothic parody