"The Mysterious Stranger," an anonymous tale originally published in German in 1823 and translated into English soon after, is the earliest vampire story with many of the elements that later found their way into Bram Stoker's Dracula: a Carpathian Mountains setting, an aristocratic vampire who sleeps in a coffin in a ruined crypt by day and has dominion over wolves, a young woman in peril.... Long out of print, this story is a gripping read in its own right. The volume is completed with two other rarely reprinted vampire tales: "The Last Lords of Gardonal" (1867) by William Gilbert, the father of the famous D'Oyly Carte librettist, and Mary Cholondeley's 1890 chiller, "Let Loose."