I, the Vampire & Other Weird, Forgotten Tales of the Undead

Brennan Koenigsreuter doesn’t just narrate this collection—he resurrects it. His voice is the kind of versatile that can switch from the smarmy charm of a vampire recounting centuries of petty grudges in ‘I, the Vampire’ to the guttural terror of a reanimated corpse clawing its way out of a coffin in ‘The Lich.’ The man has range, and he uses it to elevate del Rey’s pulpy horror from nostalgic curiosity to something genuinely unsettling. The production is crisp, with no audible distractions to pull you out of the eerie mood, though I will admit his occasional over-enunciation of period dialogue grated on me after the third story. It’s a minor quibble in an otherwise stellar performance. Del Rey’s stories are the kind of weird that feels fresh precisely because they’re forgotten. ‘The Monster’ sneaks up on you with its quiet tragedy, while ‘The House on the Borderland’ (included here, thankfully) is a cosmic horror masterclass that feels like Lovecraft toned down for a pulp audience. The only dud is ‘The Man Who Wept Blood,’ which leans too hard into melodrama, but even that’s saved by Koenigsreuter’s performance. The runtime zips by in places, but in others, the slow burn of a story like ‘The Vampire’ demands you lean in—something the narration makes effortless. If you’re a horror fan who’s tired of the same old tropes, this is your loophole back to the weird, the grotesque, and the gloriously macabre.