Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula was not the only vampire to haunt the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination. As I found when I undertook research for my anthology The Rivals of Dracula, he was but one of platoons of the undead who lurked in the pages of obscure books and magazines of the period. Work on my earlier anthology, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, had revealed the huge number of fictional detectives who sprang up in the wake of Conan Doyle’s success with his Baker Street sleuth. Now this new anthology demonstrates the era’s love of the supernatural and the ghoulish. There were fanged maidens, psychic vampires intent on destroying men’s souls, an undead Icelander who fights with one of the heroes of the sagas, a vampiric spirit that takes over the physical form of an Egyptian mummy – all waiting to be discovered.

One of the great pleasures of such research lies in the unearthing of half-forgotten writers who have lost much of whatever fame they once had. Augustus Hare, whose heyday was the 1890s, was a traveller, art lover and eccentric. Somerset Maugham, who knew him, described a visit to his country home during which the younger writer noticed that the wording of the prayers at morning worship for the servants was unfamiliar. “I’ve crossed out all the passages in glorification of God,” Hare explained. “God is certainly a gentleman and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face.” Like God, Hare was a gentleman but he was an impoverished one and he was obliged to churn out vast amounts of writing to keep himself in the style he wanted. He presents his supernatural tales as events that really happened to friends and acquaintances, although sceptics might like to note that The Vampire of Croglin Grange, the story I included in my anthology, bears a number of similarities to events in Varney the Vampire, a gore-filled penny dreadful of the 1840s.

Julian Hawthorne, son of the more famous Nathaniel, may not have had the moral vision his father needed to create The Scarlet Letter, but he was a gifted writer. I found his supernatural and Gothic fiction particularly fascinating. His novella Archibald Malmaison (1879), for instance, is a story of double personality that predates Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by seven years. Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard was a man of many and varied talents who played first-class cricket for Hampshire, investigated voodoo in Haiti, organised an expedition in search of a giant sloth said to be still living in Patagonia, trained snipers in the first world war, and wrote stories about a Zorro-like hero that were turned into a Hollywood silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks. Another Hesketh-Prichard character, “November Joe”, features in crime stories set in the Canadian Arctic. Jack London meets Conan Doyle. Hesketh-Prichard and his mother, writing under the pseudonyms of E and H Heron, created Flaxman Low, one more vampire-hunter who appears in my book, in 1898.

Many of these writers were astonishingly prolific. Those of us who manage a book or two a year, if we’re lucky, can only look back in awe at the likes of the husband-and-wife team of Alice and Claude Askew who published more than 90 in a dozen years. Their productivity was only brought to an end when they were both on an Italian steamer that was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1917 and sank. The occult detective they created features in the story Aylmer Vance and the Vampire in my anthology.

I make no claim for any of the writers in The Rivals of Dracula (or indeed The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes) as overlooked geniuses. Most of them were not literary stylists and some were obliged to pour out fiction for the weekly and monthly magazines at such a rate that quantity became as important as quality. However, they all aimed to write exciting and readable narratives, and more often than not they succeeded. It’s been a pleasure spending time immersed in their work.

Extract

From The Vampire of Croglin Grange by Augustus Hare

Suddenly the scratching sound ceased, and a kind of pecking sound took its place. Then, in her agony, she became aware that the creature was unpicking the lead! The noise continued, and a diamond pane of glass fell into the room. Then a long bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window, and the window opened, and the creature came in; and it came across the room, and her terror was so great that she could not scream, and it came up to the bed, and it twisted its long, bony fingers into her hair, and it dragged her head over the side of the bed, and – it bit her violently in the throat.

Buy the book

• The Rivals of Dracula: Stories from the Golden Age of Gothic Horror is published by No Exit Press at £9.99 and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £7.99.