Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood was a Victorian era serialized gothic horror story by Thomas Preskett Prest (alternatively attributed to James Malcolm Rymer). It first appeared in 1845–47 as a series of cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls". The story was published in book form in 1847. It is of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages divided into 220 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words. Despite its inconsistencies, Varney the Vampire is more or less a cohesive whole. It introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences to this day.