ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that English early gothic texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk may well have drawn fruitfully on Spanish seventeenth-century wife-murder plays. Blood Relations has been a quest to discover what vampires “made in Spain” since 1900 mean and where they fit both in Spanish popular culture and the transnational vampire paradigm. What means one thing when read by an English reader may come across differently to a Spanish one. Perhaps the most noticeable hallmark of the Spanish vampire fiction analysed in Blood Relations – to which that title alludes, of course – is the prevalence of vampires situated within a family context. Some of the stories analysed bear a stronger resemblance to one side of the family and some to the other, but as with human beings, when Gothic scholars look hard enough, they can always find traces of both.
