Here is a thing that terrified me as a child

Being a South Asian genre nerd, one of the things I am pretty much obligated to love is the story of Vikram and the Baital (or vampire).  I remember being suitably freaked out when one of my uncles first came to the states from India and presented me with this delicious piece of horror:

More after the jump

The look of the two title characters makes me assume it was a tie-in to the popular Indian serial (I didn’t even know it existed until I started researching for this very post).  But as a child this book creeped the living hell out of me.  The vampire just looks like an innocent old man in the picture above, but the interior illustrations have a subtle ghastliness to them, with his chalk-white skin and bright red grin.  It didn’t help that the book translated the word “Baital” as “corpse,” leading me to a VERY early and literal introduction to the idea of the “walking dead.”  (I actually remember the word “corpse” as one of the very first that I looked up thanks to this thing.)

I later tracked down a more modern, adult translation of the book and it actually holds up pretty well.  The basic plot, really a framing story, consists of King Vikram promising a holy man that he can capture a vampire that has infested a crematory ground.  He captures it easily, but it repeatedly flies away after telling him a story and asking how he would respond to the situation (not unlike a demonic law school exam).  Like other South Asian myths, he succeeds by being a bastion of moral values (although some of the gender values involved in that are pretty nasty — keep in mind it’s an 8th century Hindu myth translated by a sexually-rebellious Victorian).

But that’s a rather flat description, and you don’t have to take my word for it.  The comic book writer Samit Basu has uncovered a full, free Google Books copy of the original 1870 printing of Sir Vikram and the Vampire: Tales of Hindu Deviltry, complete with the beautiful (and effing CREEPY) original Victorian illustration.  Imagine you’re reading it by gaslight!