Here are 80 books that Slayers and Their Vampires fans have personally recommended if you like
Slayers and Their Vampires.
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From an early age, I have been fascinated with anything supernatural and occult. My Aunt would read my palm, and then, as a teenager, I would visit clairvoyants to see what the future held for me. As I grew older, I found I had an ability, a gift of seership, and after reading many books, embarked on my pagan journey, from which I have never looked back, and am now studying Druidry,which is very much nature-based. I hope you love the books on this list as much as I do!
I read this book at the tender age of ten and instantly became ever so slightly obsessed with vampires; I love how the atmosphere builds slowly, sucking me to the point that I am genuinely afraid that the wolves might attack.
The description of the locations and the journal and letter writing are wonderful story breakers, and what a uniquely wonderful story it is. For me, it is a timeless masterpiece.
23
authors picked
Dracula
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
17.
What is this book about?
'The very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years' Arthur Conan Doyle
A masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also probes identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. It begins when Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, and makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England - an unmanned ship is wrecked; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck; a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his 'Master' - and a determined group of adversaries…
I am a comic book writer, novelist, and vampire aficionado. I always want to learn the truth of a matter. I’ve moved in and out of the gothic subculture for years and spent time with members of the vampire subculture. I’ve found that most people’s understanding of vampires (and really, everything) is influenced by fiction. Even if you point out that their beliefs are only as accurate as a movie, they will still argue for them. As much as I love a good vampire movie, I want to shatter illusions and explore the myths and folklore that reflect our human experience in all of its horror and glory.
This book has engendered controversy for almost forcefully bridging the gap between the 15th Century Wallachian Prince Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler or Dracula. Stoker had already constructed his character, called “Count Wampyr,” before he learned of his future namesake. However, he quite clearly establishes a connection between the two through an explanation provided by Abraham Van Helsing. The Dracula of the eponymous novel is a heavily fictionalized version of the real-life figure, but so are most similarly positioned characters in literature, film, and television. Florescu and McNally provide a cursory overview of Slavic and Balkan vampire folklore, a biographical sketch of Vlad the Impaler, and illuminate the process by which Stoker adapted this violent, cunning, and sometimes brilliant nationalist and military tactician into a fictional monster.
The true story behind the legend of Dracula - a biography of Prince Vlad of Transylvania, better known as Vlad the Impaler. This revised edition now includes entries from Bram Stoker's recently discovered diaries, the amazing tale of Nicolae Ceausescu's attempt to make Vlad a national hero, and an examination of recent adaptations in fiction, stage and screen.
In 2009 I published a book on the real vampire community. I didn’t know that Twilightwas about to sweep America and I inadvertently became a “vampire guy” for a few years. I appeared on Geraldo and NPR. I was interviewed by the Colbert Report (but it never aired). I even talked to MTV about hosting a show where I interview teenage vampires. Then we all got into zombies instead and my fifteen minutes of fame were over! I learned a great deal researching my book and giving talks on vampires. In 2010 I taught a special class at Tufts University on vampires where I assigned selections from these books.
Michelle Belanger is a psychic vampire and an intellectual leader of the real vampire community. This book draws on her experiences of coming to self-identify as a psychic vampire and she actually began writing it in notebooks while in college. The Psychic Vampire Codex provided vocabulary for people in this community to talk about their experiences and a metaphysical theory of what exactly psychic vampires are and why they are different from other people.
I have had the opportunity to meet Belanger and she is a really fascinating person. She founded a metaphysical community called House Kheperu and offers workshops on magick and psychic energy. She is also a fiction author, musician, activist, and many other things.
The Psychic Vampire Codex is the first book to examine the phenomenon and experience of modern vampirism completely from the vampire's perspective. Father Sebastiaan, a fellow vampire writes in the foreword that Michelle Belanger's system "introduced a breath of fresh air into the vampire subculture. It freed us to look at ourselves in a new light, and it also helped those outside our community to view us differently. No longer were we parasites or predators . . . we could use our inborn abilities to help people heal." Psychic vampires are people who prey on the vital, human life energies…
In 2009 I published a book on the real vampire community. I didn’t know that Twilightwas about to sweep America and I inadvertently became a “vampire guy” for a few years. I appeared on Geraldo and NPR. I was interviewed by the Colbert Report (but it never aired). I even talked to MTV about hosting a show where I interview teenage vampires. Then we all got into zombies instead and my fifteen minutes of fame were over! I learned a great deal researching my book and giving talks on vampires. In 2010 I taught a special class at Tufts University on vampires where I assigned selections from these books.
This is a really thorough, fascinating encyclopedia of all things vampire––from folklore to nineteenth-century literature to obscure religious movements to comic books and movies to true crime. Whatever you want to know about vampires, this book will have it or tell you where you can find it. J. Gordon Melton is a total fanatic when it comes to vampire lore and he encouraged me early on when I first began researching the vampire community. Besides vampires, Melton loves to collect obscure information and data on all manner of religious groups. He once described himself to me as “a very greedy scholar” because there are so many topics that he tracks and researches. He can also tell you the best used bookstores in any city in America.
Death and immortality, sexual prowess and surrender, intimacy and alienation, rebellion and temptation. The allure of the vampire is eternal. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, 3rd edition, explores the historical, literary, mythological, biographical, and popular aspects of one of the world's most mesmerizing paranormal subject. This vast reference is an alphabetical tour of the psychosexual, macabre world of the soul-sucking undead.This exhaustive guide has more than 400 essays to quench your thirst for facts, biographies, definitions, and more.
I’m a scientist, engineer, and writer who has written on a wide range of topics. I’ve been fascinated by mythology my entire life, and I spent over a decade gathering background material on the myth of Perseus and Medusa, and came away with a new angle on the origin and meaning of the myth and what inspired it. I was unable to present this in a brief letter or article, and so decided to turn my arguments into a book.
The book is still in print, and has been cited numerous times by scholarly journals and books. It formed the basis for the History Channel series Clash of the Gods (in which I appear).
The figure of the vampire has become very familiar through portrayals in literature, stage, and cinema, but where does the myth itself originate?
Many have speculated on the roots of the vampire legend, ascribing it to various diseases, like porphyriaor rabies. But Barber stripped away the cultural additions imposed on the legend by its fictional interpretation and looked for origins consistent with the bare, original legend.
A nice piece of folkloric detective work, and one that influenced my own book.
In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading.
"This study's comprehensiveness and the author's bone-dry wit make this compelling reading, not just for folklorists, but for anyone interested in a time when the dead wouldn't stay dead."-Booklist
In 2009 I published a book on the real vampire community. I didn’t know that Twilightwas about to sweep America and I inadvertently became a “vampire guy” for a few years. I appeared on Geraldo and NPR. I was interviewed by the Colbert Report (but it never aired). I even talked to MTV about hosting a show where I interview teenage vampires. Then we all got into zombies instead and my fifteen minutes of fame were over! I learned a great deal researching my book and giving talks on vampires. In 2010 I taught a special class at Tufts University on vampires where I assigned selections from these books.
Montague Summers was a really unusual fellow for the early twentieth century. He was a closeted gay man (closeted because homosexuality was brutally repressed at the time) who was obsessed with the occult and liked to present himself as a religious witch hunter/demonologist. Reportedly he was often seen leaving libraries with a big black file that read “Vampires” across the front where everyone could see it.
Despite being a colorful character, Summers is one of the best early scholars of vampire lore. His work is even more interesting because it reflects the occult revival underway at the end of the nineteenth century. Occult groups such as the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn were reimagining what vampires could be. They hypothesized that vampires could be real but are perhaps more akin to invisible ghosts that feed on human life force. Summers also discusses things like…
. Summers wrote numerous serious books about the witch hunts, vampires, werewolves, and other occult subjects.
This book has all of the apparatus to qualify as an academic study, including footnotes, extensive quotations in the original languages, and references to rare source documents. Of particular interest is the final chapter, which traces the development of the vampire craze in 19th century literature.
I am a comic book writer, novelist, and vampire aficionado. I always want to learn the truth of a matter. I’ve moved in and out of the gothic subculture for years and spent time with members of the vampire subculture. I’ve found that most people’s understanding of vampires (and really, everything) is influenced by fiction. Even if you point out that their beliefs are only as accurate as a movie, they will still argue for them. As much as I love a good vampire movie, I want to shatter illusions and explore the myths and folklore that reflect our human experience in all of its horror and glory.
There are people out there who think they are (or at least call themselves) vampires. At the extreme end, a handful of violent, deranged individuals believe they are the real article and are entitled to attack the living for sustenance. At the other end are role-players, cosplayers, and fans that are just in it for the fangs and the finery. In the middle, there are a wide range of types and personalities. Some believe they are physically addicted to drinking blood and seek out willing donors. Others find a morbid, sexual thrill in the practice. Still others believe they can, and need to, drain the energy of those around them (Colin Robinson, anyone?).
The subculture is vast, nuanced, and always growing. But what it is more often than not is misunderstood. While many are happy to talk about their practices, others shun attention for fear of being mocked, misunderstood, and…
I saw Francis Coppola’s movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992, but studied the novel only after I created a photo story,The Ultimate Dracula(Munich, 2012). Next to the images, my book presented the true location Stoker had in mind for his fictitious Castle Dracula (No, notBram Castle), and the historical person he referred to while speaking about Count Dracula (No, notVlad the Impaler). The next steps were discovering the true locations of Carfax and the Scholomance, unraveling the backgrounds of the Icelandic and Swedish versions of Dracula, and unearthing the first US serialization. I simply love to solve riddles. By now, I am organizing international Draculaconferences.
Leslie Klinger’s annotated version of Draculais one of the most recent editions, and it surely is the most entertaining one, suitable for readers who are no Draculaexperts (yet). Some of his comments build on the (purely fictional) assumption that the Count himself had his hand in editing Stoker’s text. In a single instance, when it comes to the historical Dracula family, Klinger drops the ball, but he makes a unique contribution to Dracula Studies by comparing Dracula’s final text with that of Stoker’s typescript, found in a barn in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. His attention to geographical details greatly inspired my own research into this matter. The book comes with a number of illustrations and helpful appendixes.
In his first work since his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger returns with this spectacular, lavishly illustrated homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. With a daring conceit, Klinger accepts Stoker's contention that the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Traveling through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania, Klinger's notes illuminate every aspect of this haunting narrative (including a detailed examination of the original typescript of Dracula, with its shockingly different ending, previously unavailable to scholars). Klinger investigates the many subtexts of the original narrative-from masochistic,…
I’m a paranormal fantasy author who loves vampires. They’re my favorite supernatural creatures. I think my obsession with vamps started when I saw Underworld for the first time. I had watched Blade before and thought, “I’d like to see a movie with just as much action but also romance” and voila! Some prefer the darker, less romantic vampire stories in which the bloodsuckers are monsters, but I prefer to read and write stories where they’re more than just their hunger. So if you’re like me and like a good combination of vampire action and seduction, you will probably enjoy the books on my list.
Again, it’s so hard to choose between all the amazing books in The Black Dagger Brotherhood, and the Black Dagger Legacy series, but Blood Fury has one of my favorite M/M romances ever. Ruhn and Saxton aren’t even the main couple, but gods, do they steal the show! I got all the feels. I shivered and teared up, laughed, and swooned. Ruhn is a gentle giant, and Saxton has had his poor heart broken in quite a spectacular way, but they find each other, and… I’ll stop because I’ll spoil the awesomeness. The spice is hot as hell too, so don’t read in public ;)
In this sexy paranormal romance novel set in the world of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1 New York Times bestselling author J. R. Ward tells the story of two couples - both fighting to find love in the midst of the war with the Lessening Society.
A vampire aristocrat, Peyton is well aware of his duty to his bloodline: mate with an appropriate female of his class and carry on his family's traditions. And he thought he'd found his perfect match - until she fell in love with someone else. Yet when his split-second decision in a battle with the…
I have written more than 20 non-fiction books on a wide range of topics. I was trained as a chemist and physicist, and as both an author and a journalist I am mostly concerned with the sciences and how they interact with the broader culture – with the arts, politics, philosophy, and society. Sometimes that interest takes me further afield, and in my new book The Modern Myths, I present a detailed look at seven tales that have taken on the genuine stature of myth, being retold again and again as vehicles for the fears, dreams, and anxieties of the modern age. Ranging from Robinson Crusoe to Batman, this list also inevitably includes Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula – leading him to examine how we have used the legend of the vampire in the past and present.
Nick is a professor of English at the University of Exeter in the UK – but he is better known as the “Prof. of Goth”, being interested in all things Gothic. He is an example of the generation of humanities scholars who have broken down traditional boundaries between “high” and “low” culture, having written on topics ranging from Shakespeare to J. R. R. Tolkien and Nick Cave. Nick’s book on vampires is a comprehensive history that traces the evolution of these creatures from feral beasts of folklore to the aristocratic Dracula and his screen portrayals from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee. His book leaves no doubt that, whatever else vampires might be, they are an important cultural phenomenon.
An authoritative new history of the vampire, two hundred years after it first appeared on the literary scene
Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori's publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom's detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind's fears, to that of an…
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