“Grettir at Thorhall-stead” (1903)

About the closest I’ve ever got to the writer Frank Norris is the 1924 movie Greed, based on his novel McTeague. Norris, a Chicago native, died of appendicitis at the age of 32 but that was enough time to establish himself as a promising journalist and naturalist fiction writer, peer to Theodore Dreiser and under heavy influence of Emile Zola. But apparently, as this vampire tale seems to suggest, Norris also had some interest (perhaps only commercial?) in the dark and fantastical tales of European lore. This story is set in a dark, brooding, and unpleasantly cold and volcanic Iceland—not the exotic otherworldly home of Bjork and progressive politics we know from pictures today, but a harsh and remote cold rocky land. It sounds like Norris had been there, but maybe he only read accounts. The first section of this story introduces Glamr, a name associated with a 13th-century Icelandic saga and also used in an 1863 story by Sabine Baring-Gould. Another character here, Grettir, has similar origins. This Glamr is a big stocky handyman at Thorhall’s remote homestead, hired to be a shepherd. I’m not sure what to call Thorhall’s spread—a ranch? Plantation? Farm? What? Glamr threatens the harmony there as an “unbeliever” in a close-knit Christian community. But he’s the first victim along with some animals. This vampire has the strength and size to break the backs of both humans and horses. Before they can bury Glamr, however, his body disappears. Also there had been no trace of wounds on his body, not even the usual tell-tale puncture wounds on the neck. This is a different kind of vampire story, where the vampire is more a wild beast. No tuxedos required, and it’s not really that supernatural, except in a loose and ancient kind of way of thinking about things. Next, all household members, separately, are possessed by intense feelings of foreboding, followed shortly by a sighting by one of the maids of Glamr at a window. Summer comes and goes. Glamr’s replacement, Thorgaut, is more popular around the place than the ill-natured unbeliever Glamr. Grettir himself finally shows up well into the second half—the God of Thunder, more or less, a Hercules type, “well known and well beloved throughout all Iceland.” Nice color all along the way, seals and other things barking in the distance. A big fight ensues, which Grettir wins of course, but not before the vampire fills him with fear by telling him his future is bleak. A very strange story indeed from a young US American naturalist novelist, with not much online to tell when Norris wrote it. He died in 1902 and the story was published posthumously.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.