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forthegothicheroine · 4 years

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Hi! Can you recommend any (non-YA) books about vampires (besides Interview w the vampire, dracula, or the Ouroboros cycle)? Thank you 💕

I sure can!

*Dons a stripey hat and gestures to a shelf of vampire books like I'm selling Springfield a monorail*

The great thing about vampire books is that they start with the letter V and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool. I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm carrying on with that joke. But seriously, the great thing about vampire books is that they can be used for vastly different tones and effects- gruesome horror, ghostly romance, psychological character study, etc. There's also a great distance between just what a vampire is from one book to another. So there's a wide range of things to choose from!

Some favorites:

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix: The nice southern ladies in a true crime book club are the only ones who notice something wrong about the handsome drifter who just came to town. It seems that all of society is completely snowed by his charm and built to excuse his faults- and meanwhile, the children keep dying. There is an attempt to talk about 1980s racism here that is a bit clumsy, but god damn is this book compelling.

The Quick by Lauren Owen: In the tradition of Dracula, here's another clash between predatory vampires and scholarly types. It's a fun, fast-paced throwback to an earlier era of gothic novels, with a more modern approach to the characters' psychology. I'm not sure why it's only at 3.26 stars on Goodreads- what more did people want?

A Taste of Blood Wine by Frieda Warrington: This is probably the best you're going to find out of vampire romance. It's lush and dramatic and swooning, and though it can't quite smooth everything out, reading it is a hell of an experience. It also has sequels, which I have not read.

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers: Vampires haunting the romantic poets- it doesn't get more gothic than this! The villainess of this book isn't a traditional vampire but something more mythological, the fury of nature and art and desire. You'll probably never think about Polidori the same way (assuming you think about Polidori already.)

The Shiny Narrow Grin by Jane Gaskell: This one might be YA? Maybe? But it's from 1964, so it certainly doesn't read like modern YA. An unhappy girl faces the everyday horrors of her life while deciding what to do about that handsome boy she met. Is his sensitive act real, or is it hiding something inhuman? Or both? This is available online with a little googleing, and is much darker and spookier than most teen vampire stories.

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon: George, a young soldier in psychiatric care, is a vampire. Sort of. This has a lot more in common with Psycho than it does with Dracula (though it is an epistolary novel!) This is the original gritty horror reinterpretation of a classic monster, stripped down and startling even today.

The Book of Renfield by Tim Lucas: You know Dracula, but have you read this? Rewrites of Dracula are a dime a dozen, but this look into the life of his poor traumatized minion is one of the only ones that really felt to me like it was doing something interesting. If you don't already cry for Renfield, you will.

Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu: I imagine you know this one? If you don't, it's a classic Victorian novella about the tragic relationship between two girls named Laura and Carmilla. Beautiful prose guides us through nightmares, animal transformations, and breathless proclamations of love, and there's a very good reason it's still beloved over a century later.

Not my favorites, but interesting:

Salem's Lot, The Gilda Stories, The Delicate Dependency, Dark Dance by Tanith Lee.

Let me know what good stuff I've left out!

#vampires #horror novels

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