BEST VAMPIRE NOVELS

Okay, before we get to it, let me you tell you straight up that DRACULA is NOT ON THE LIST. And Anne Rice only makes the list once. As amazing as some of her Vampire books are, she quickly ran out of things to say, but continued to take 600 pages per book to not say them!

Mr. Stoker gets his due for inventing the fictional culture of vampirism and laying down the ground rules. We all know the rules; shall I list them? Garlic, mirror, daylight, sleeping in a coffin with your native soil, silver bullet, crosses, wooden stake in the heart. And therein lies the problem. There are way too many books that travel down that tired road. It's okay to break the mold, and believe me, there are plenty of vampire stories that are moldy. Here are a few of the best, whether working within Stoker's tradition or breaking all the rules. Listed alphabetically. 

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BLOODSUCKING FIENDS by Christopher Moore
Screamingly hilarious. If Kurt Vonnegut had written a vampire book, this might have been it.

Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under a Dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching neck, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realizes the decision has been made for her.
Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that's where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, Indiana, Tommy (to his friends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen-turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful undead redhead walks through the door ... hires Tommy to do daytime errands for her and proceeds to rock Tommy's life -- and afterlife -- in ways he never imagined possible.


CARRION COMFORT & CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT by Dan Simmons

Simmons is the only writer who makes this list twice, which is odd since he is only nominally considered a horror writer. After making his initial mark as a horror novelist (Stoker Award winning Song of Kali) Simmons moved on to write science fiction, hard-boiled mystery and literary-historical fiction. However, he did write two great classic horror / vampire novels before he moved into different literary circles.
Carrion Comfort I have written about elsewhere (Some Charleston Fiction). The vampirism featured here is psychic, not the blood-letting kind. The basic plot is about a small group of people who have an Ability, where they can possess someone mentally and Use them to do their bidding. They also use their Ability to Feed, prolonging their lives by mentally drawing sustenance from people. The battle among the Users with the Ability for power leads for a gargantuan plot and a cast of more than two dozen characters, from Nazis to southern sheriffs, to Holocaust survivors to Hollywood moguls to CEOs of the world's largest corporations.

In Children of the Night Simmons takes a completely different look at vampires. This time, however, the count's sanguinary tippling habits may hold the cure for both AIDS and cancer. The key lies with a Romanian orphan adopted by American hematologist Kate Neuman; the infant, Joshua, has a series of rare diseases, and can survive only because his body extracts and processes genetic material from blood transfusions. If the virus in his system responsible for this ability can be isolated, his diseases could be remedied and medical marvels would be within Kate's grasp. The drawback is that Joshua has inherited his talents from the decrepit but murderous Vlad Dracula, and this patriarch of an accursed clan of blood-drinkers is more interested in perpetuating his power than in providing miracle cures for the masses. Simmons makes the fantastical scientific claims easy to swallow and the book offers a mesmerizing tour through the ghostly, gray tatters of Romania.


FEVRE DREAM by George R. R. Martin
Roger Zelazny got it right when he said, "George R.R. Martin, somehow, has managed to write a novel that will delight fans of both Stephen King and Mark Twain."
Set in the middle of the 19th century, Fevre Dream is the story of the strange friendship that develops between river boat captain Abner Marsh and Joshua York, vampire. Marsh is a down-on-his-luck owner of a fleet of river boats that was crushed to kindling by a hard freeze on the Mississippi River; York, a vampire on a quest to unite his race with the freedom to no longer depend on blood for their sustenance. And when York seeks out Marsh and offers to buy him the boat of his dreams in exchange for the right to take that boat odd places when it suits his purposes – no questions asked - the adventure begins.
Featuring everything from quotes from the poet, Byron, - "She walks in beauty, like the night…" - to a truly disturbing banquet featuring a baby's hand offered on the end of a silver fork, Fevre Dream is rich in atmosphere, long on action, and deep in great characters. The vampires are the traditional, blood-sucking, live-forever-unless-you-drive-a-stake-through-their-heart, shun-the-daylight sort of vampires. What makes this novel stand out is the exceptionally high quality of writing, the extraordinary relationships that develop between the characters, and the perfect setting – a 19th century river boat on a Mississippi River that's about to run red with blood.

THE HUNGER by Whitley StreiberMiriam Blaylock is not a weepy, broody, remorseful vampire. She is stunningly beautiful, intelligent, and very lonely, to whom humans are nothing more than animals. She is a chillingly evil character in the way that she treats her human lovers and dominates them and the matter-of-fact way she stalks people knowing that no one will ever be able to stop her. Strieber does an admirable job of letting you feel her loneliness, as the last of her kind, but then reminds you what it means to be loved by her, that you could end up spending eternity rotting conscious in a box.

Her current lover and companion is John Blaylock, only a couple hundred years old when he starts to age rapidly, showing the signs of degeneration that Miriam has seen so many times before. As John deteriorates, Miriam prepares her next companion ( a woman) for the transformation, but John consumes her before she's ready. Desperate, Miriam impulsively chooses Dr. Sarah Roberts to be her next, for Dr. Roberts has been intensively researching aging and the human biological clock. But Dr. Roberts is not who she appears to be ...


I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson
Written in 1954, this novel casts a long shadow on current vampire and zombie fiction (and movies), although very few people know how great this book it. Most people only know the movies (The Last Man On Earth - Vincent Price; The Omega Man - Charlton Heston; I Am Legend - Will Smith) and each film is good in its own way. But the book ... is a classic.

After a plague decimates society, infecting the living and creating vampires, Robert Neville finds himself as quite possibly the last living human on earth. Even though the book has a huge creep factor, it is ultimately a heartbreaking portrayal of a man faced with the utmost loneliness.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE by Anne Rice
The story is a simple one: having suffered a tremendous personal loss, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac descends into an alcoholic stupor. At his emotional nadir, he is confronted by Lestat, a charismatic and powerful vampire who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. The two prey on innocents, give their "dark gift" to a young girl, and seek out others of their kind (notably the ancient vampire Armand) in Paris.

Rich in atmosphere and literally dripping with vampire lore and lifestyle, this book was justly famous when it was released. I read it when it was first released 1976 upon the recommendation of my high school English teacher. Although Rice has continued to explore this world in with varying degrees of success, Interview is a legitimate classic.

MIDNIGHT MASS by F. Paul Wilson
In Wilson's creepy, terrifying thriller, vampires are rapidly taking over the planet. They've got Europe, and now they're encroaching on the East Coast of the U.S. In New Jersey, Carole, a nun, witnesses the death and transformation into a vampire of her best friend. After killing the vampire who used to be her friend, Carole becomes a vigilante, killing vampires and "cowboys," the humans who have aligned themselves with the vampires. She saves a rabbi, Zev, who is seeking Father Joe, hoping to enlist him in the fight against the vampires. Joe's niece Lacey has turned up with the same idea, but Joe himself is trying to drink away his problems. Zev and Lacey, however, succeed in drawing him into the fight, and all three head to St. Anthony's Church to retake it from vampires led by Father Palmeri, a corrupt priest-turned-vampire. But when the vampires capture Joe, the stakes are raised in ways neither side could have imagined. Wilson makes his vampires truly frightening and the eerie atmosphere of the book not unlike that of the movie 28 Days Later. The undead might have every advantage, but the likable, compelling mortals in this gripping read aren't giving up easily.

SALEM'S LOT by Stephen King
This was King's second novel and was the book that began the King phenomenon, which quickly took off with the release of The Shining. But this was 1975, and Lot was released a few months before Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire and suddenly, vampires (and horror fiction) were hot!

Lot examines about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire that is consiously patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula. This novel has two elements that King was to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil. Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light."

THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW by Richard Laymon
On a hot August morning in the summer of 1963, in the rural town of Grandville, tacked to power poles and trees, fliers have appeared announcing the mysterious one-night-only performance of The Traveling Vampire Show.
The show will feature Valeria, the only known vampire in captivity. According to the fliers, she is a gorgeous, stunning beauty. In the course of the performance, she will stalk volunteers from the audience, sink her teeth into their necks and drink their blood!
For three local teenagers who see the fliers, this is a show they don't want to miss.
The Traveling Vampire Show is the tale of what happened to them on that hot summer day. It's the story of their friendship and love, their temptations, their betrayals, and their courage as they went where they shouldn't go, did what they shouldn't do... and ran into big trouble.
Laymon is an interesting writer. Devoid of almost any literary intent, he writes in-your-face stories that begin immediately and take the reader into dark dark places, but often with a wry sense of humor. Laymon is a storyteller, period. And this book is one of his best.