This review is one of many I was reading on Wikipedia about Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë as it was released at the time under the pseudonym Ellis Bell:
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Graham's Lady Magazine wrote "How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."
Wow. I tried reading that book a long time ago but couldn't get past the old-timey English language style it was written in. Seen several of the movie adaptations, my favorite being the classic 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, even though it isn't true to the novel. In the 1992 version, Ralph Fiennes played a very creepy and vicious Heathcliff.
This explains the character.
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As a proto vampire novel
At one stage Heathcliff is described as a vampire, and it has been suggested that both he and Catherine are in fact meant to be seen as vampires (or at least as vampire like personalities in "Heathcliff as Vampire," James Twitchell argues that Heathcliff is meant to be seen as vampire-like, without actually being one[13]).[14] Leo Bersani claims that desire in the novel is "essentially vampiristic."