In this amazing book, the queen of the English gothic novel Anna Radcliffe is the vampire hunter, the vampires themselves are collective bodies with a retinue of creatures that can be called biorobots, and near Belgrade lies the mysterious and invisible vampire city of Selena. If we add that “The City Vampires" combines a clever parody of the Gothic novel, satire, black comedy and horror fiction, the reader will have the right to decide that the book was written by an inveterate postmodernist. But this is not so: the most striking thing is that this novel was created in the second half of the 19th century, and its author was the Frenchman Paul Feval (1816–1887), best known for his adventure sagas. The book was translated into Russian for the first time.