Varney the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood: A Romance (1845-7) is one of the longest-running and most successful "penny bloods," or Victorian periodical serial fictions. Written primarily by James Malcolm Rymer, the creator of penny fiction villain Sweeney Todd, Varney is the missing link between John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). It established many lasting conventions of vampire literature and is an important precursor to the vampires of Silent Era American cinema.