From Blood Rose Magazine

"Anyone who writes vampire stuff, reads vampire stories, or just plain likes vampire mythology, should read this; a must-possess for any goth."

An excerpt...

'The belief in vampires, ghouls, and lamies, all of which are more or less similar, appears to have been known from time immemorial among the Arabs and Persians. The Thousand and One Nights and many other Oriental stories turn on this subject, and the terrible superstition is still believed in by the Arabs. Plato and Democritus say (and traces of this belief are not unknown among the Semites), that souls lived for a certain time close to their dead bodies, which they sometimes preserved from corruption...'

--from chp 9, Vampirism Among the Orientals: Funerary Feasts and Orgies