With trembling hands, CHRIS TITLEY opens a new guide to British supernatural fiction

"HE drags her head to the bed's edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth - a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!"

And so it was that Varney The Vampire claimed his first victim, leaving his mark on British fiction in the process. Varney and his creator, James Rymer, have largely been forgotten. But his 1845 novel, adapted from lurid weekly serials known as penny bloods, was crucial in establishing the vampire as an archetype of supernatural fiction. And it inspired other authors to put their own spin on the same theme, most famously Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Both Rymer and Stoker merit entries in a new guide to everything spooky in British literature. Shadows In The Attic: a guide to British supernatural fiction 1820-1950 is the product of five years of research by Neil Wilson, from the British Library, Boston Spa near Wetherby.

The extensive reference work provides a biography and bibliography for 200 authors. Mr Wilson stresses this is not a "top 200" list - as the inclusion of Rymer confirms.

"I really wanted to show the whole range of fiction, even some of the really dreadful stuff we would now consider virtually unreadable.

"I tried to put in the books that best reflect the evolution of the genre for good or for ill."

Mr Wilson, 49, first became hooked on supernatural fiction when he was at university and read an MR James story. James (1862-1936) "continues to be regarded by many as the master of the ghost story", he writes in the guide.

Soon he was reading other, similar works. "It became apparent that, unlike detective fiction, romantic fiction or various other genres, this was a genre which many of the most promising writers of the time got into," he said.

Many literary aristocrats are included in Shadows In The Attic, Charles Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bront and Rudyard Kipling among them.

The range of subject matter is equally impressive, covering not just ghosts but all manner of paranormal apparitions: werewolves, vampires, accursed demons and the like.

Why the dates, 1820-1950? Because this was when "a recognisably modern style of supernatural fiction emerged, distinct from earlier ghostly folk tales or the more recent macabre fantasies of the Gothic period".

After the war, things had changed. "With the end of the Second World War, and all the horror it brought to light, came a more realistic type of fantasy horror stories. Science fiction was also on the ascendant."

And everyone associates the traditional ghost story with the Victorian period. All that fog, those dark alleyways and gas-lit mansions... and then there's sex.

Sex? "Vampires in particular were a great excuse for Victorian writers to allude to sexuality, which they couldn't mention in any other way."

The Victorians certainly didn't invent the ghost story. The Ancient Greeks could tell a fine spine-chiller. It has persisted through the centuries because the format provides writers with the perfect dramatic template.

"It is one of those archetypal situations where something has gone wrong that must be put right.

"In the detective story it's much more concrete: someone has committed a murder and the hero has to bring the killer to justice.

"In the ghost story, the natural order of the world has been disrupted and something has to be done to sort it out: if somebody's been murdered, the ghost may walk until such time as the murderer has been found out; or the bones are found and must be reburied in consecrated ground."

In this scientific, secular age, supernatural stories remain hugely popular, as the success of the X Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer prove. And contemporary writers are updating the tradition: one such is Ramsey Campbell, who penned the introduction to Shadows In The Attic. Why do we still lap this stuff up?

"There's that feeling, 'there but for the grace of God go I'," explains Mr Wilson. "And the sense of schadenfreude - pleasure at somebody else's discomfort.

"One reason why people love ghost stories is that we just love to be scared."

Pressed to name a favourite, Mr Wilson cites a story by Bradford writer Oliver Onions (1863-1961), The Beckoning Fair One.

"It's one of the best ghost stories ever written. Interestingly, Onions didn't believe in ghosts at all."

By contrast Mr Wilson keeps an open mind on the subject. Despite undertaking research in the British Library in London, home, so they say, to several spooks, he has yet to see one.

Having completed the 550-page Shadows In The Attic the librarian admits to being tempted to write his own ghost story.

"Having read so many of them, the difficulty is trying to find something that hasn't already been done."

Modern technology may prove the answer. "I spend most of my time on computers. We are still waiting for a really good ghost story involving a modern PC.

"With some of the inexplicable things that happen to computers, it's sometimes as if they're possessed."

Shadows In The Attic: a guide to British supernatural fiction 1820-1950 by Neil Wilson is published by The British Library, price £45, and is available from Turpin Distribution on 01462 488900.