87 books like Vampire Lore

Carlo Ginzburg has written a great deal about witches and is an expert in ‘microhistory’–the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history.

This book is a culmination of his more academic research, in which he discusses not just witches but (importantly for me) the putative undercurrent of Central European shamanism in the witchcraft trials in Northern Italy. What does that have to do with vampires? I have long held a hypothesis that Friuli, where the benandanti (reputed to leave their bodies at night to fight witches), is a region where Slavic vampire folklore may have come into contact with Western European witchcraft beliefs.

Elizabeth Miller is one of the foremost scholars on Dracula and the literary (and cinematic) vampire. Although my research has focused on folklore about vampires and similar beings, you can’t really discuss the significance of vampires without discussing Dracula.

Elizabeth’s book tells you about Bram Stoker’s sources, his writing process, the geography of Dracula, and Vlad the Impaler, among other things, separating out facts from wrong ideas that have gotten passed around in popular culture. This book was invaluable for the chapter in my book discussing the novel Dracula.

Serious students of vampire folklore are aware that the motif is found all over Eastern and Central Europe. Gabor Klaniczay is a Hungarian historian whose research focuses on witches and other supernatural entities in the cultures of Austro-Hungary and its environs.

This book showed me so many things that I and other American readers get wrong. For example, most people believe that the “blood countess,” Erzebeta Bathory, drank the blood of local virgins, but Klaniczay shows that these reports were actually constructed to get her out of the way of an inheritance scheme. Klaniczay is also an expert on Central European shamanism, and this led to my assertion that vampire lore incorporates some shamanistic beliefs.

During the final phases of my dissertation research, I taught a course at the University of Virginia titled “Blood and Sacrifice.” Girard's book validated my hypothesis that the vampire figure is a scapegoat. It discusses topics such as ‘stereotypes of persecution,’ ‘violence and magic,’ and others. I used Girard’s writings on sacrifice to bolster my claim that societies need to construct scapegoats (such as vampires or witches) to avoid creating internal social chaos and blame.

Though his approach is that of a literary scholar, his erudition creates a very thorough understanding of a socio-structural phenomenon that has existed as long in human history as we have had writing, and certainly longer.

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 ;)

My teen years were spent in the early 2000s, so Anne Rice was the OG to me for urban fantasy. Tale of the Body Thief is my favorite story of hers. Like my novel and current city, it also takes place in DC (Georgetown!) and I love retracing Lestat’s footsteps through the novel as he visited notable places like Martin’s Tavern. The plot focuses on Lestat body-switching with a human who ends up stealing the vampire’s body. If you’ve seen Interview With the Vampire, you don’t really need to have read the other books in the series to read this one. For me, I love that it’s a fun literary ride with familiar characters and setting. 

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.

Of all the epistolary horror stories I've yet encountered, this is the most bizarre and puzzling, thanks to a disturbed, unreliable, maddening, yet pitiable narrator.

Is the young diarist insane, or is she the only person who can see the truth of what’s happening in her sheltered boarding school? Is the new girl, Ernessa, a vampire? Is Ernessa even real at all? I couldn't tell, but I kept wondering.

I thoroughly enjoyed the mystery and the experience of trying to determine what was actually going on.

Whereas Barber expounds upon the anthropological origins of the vampire myth, McClelland focuses on the practices, principles, and logistics of killing the dead. The most familiar form comes in the unearthing and mutilation of bodies. McClelland explains the whys and wherefores of that practice, but he also gives their killers more than their due, explaining the role of vampire slayers as shamans, village elders, and quasi-religious figures during Europe’s transition from its pagan roots to modern Christianity. He demonstrates that vampires fell into an uneasy space between a fading system of peasant folklore and the organized religious rituals and beliefs that ultimately took their place. There are no vampires in the Bible, so where was the church during the vampire hysteria of the 1800s and how did they regard these mythical creatures? McClelland answers that and more. He also includes an overview of our modern conception of vampire slayers from… show more.

I’ve always been a fan of vampire stories and the related lore. From Dracula to Buffy to Anne Rice, I love all the different takes on vampire mythology, so The Incurables was a really neat book to discover. It takes a different approach to vampire lore, making it a viral disease that affects certain people based on their biology. The main character, Eveleen, contracts the disease and is put in an underground bunker with other infected, as the government tries to cure them, but there are much darker forces at play, and conspiracies to uncover and escapes to plan. The story was dark and twisty with threads of romance and really high stakes, and basically everything I love about vampire stories.