Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood is a Victorian-era serialized gothic horror story variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.

The author was paid by the typeset line,[1] so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages[2] and 232 chapters.

The plot concerns the troubles that Sir Francis Varney inflicts upon the Bannerworths, a formerly wealthy family driven to ruin by their recently deceased father.

The story is at times inconsistent and confusing, as if the author did not know whether to make Varney a literal vampire or simply a human who acts like one.

He is portrayed as loathing his condition, and at one point he turns Clara Crofton, a member of another family he terrorizes, into a vampire for revenge.

He ultimately commits suicide by throwing himself into Mount Vesuvius, after having left a written account of his origin with a sympathetic priest.

[7] According to Varney, he was cursed with vampirism after he betrayed a royalist to Oliver Cromwell, and subsequently killed his own son accidentally in a fit of anger.

[15] In 2021, Varney appears as a character in Castlevania season 4, as an alter ego of Death (voiced by Malcolm McDowell), used to operate beneath notice to advance his goals.