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[1] 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 [2] and 232 chapters.[3] Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.[4]