Recent politically based works on the vampire novel have been orientated towards Irish or postcolonial contexts. In this work Matthew Gibson couches the work of Mérimée, Polidori, Le Fanu, Stoker and Verne in the immediate and specific context in which their works were written - namely the right response to the Balkan, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian politics. While tracing the views and opinions of the writers themselves, he also analyzes their works to reveal that the vampire acts as an allegory of the Near East through which they suggest (rather than avow) frequently unorthodox views, which are a challenge to critics who profess the 'orientalism' argument popular today.