VAMPIRES BEFORE TWILIGHT, BEFORE BUFFY, BEFORE BRAM STOKER: Toby Lichtig in the Times Literary Supplement reviews scholarship on how and when vampires entered the European imagination. “By 1741 the term was commonly used as a synonym for a “cruel exactor or extortioner”. In keeping with the characteristics of the creature it signifies, the etymology of the word is harder to pin down, “vampire” having been variously attributed to the Chuvash word väpär, meaning “bad ghost”; the Tatar ubyr (“witch”); and, perhaps more tenuously, to the ancient Greek king Amphiaraus.”