Armchair travel around the world!
Start your reading adventures with our FREE Reading Atlas.
- Around the World in 14 Books
- 7 Thrilling Book Series
- 6 Audiobooks That Are Like Theater For Your Ears
So romantic, so deadly. It’s hard to resist a tall, dark, brooding, black-clad, courtly, seductive, repulsive, violent vampire. Such exquisite terror and sweeping adventure! But at their core, the best vampire tales are also stories of loneliness and the desperate wish for a love to last all time.
The first literary vampire to rise up and bare his fangs is found in the 1748 poem The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder: And as softly thou art sleeping / To thee shall I come creeping / And thy life’s blood drain away.
In 1819, John William Polidori — a guest at the same party where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein — gave us The Vampyre, and we were introduced to the now-ubiquitous vision of an aristocratic villain (with deathly pale skin and a fine black suit), hunting among society’s beautiful people.
Fast forward through time, and you’ll meet Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Vampire Lestat in Anne Rice’s modern classics; Twilight’s Cullen family with sparkly heartthrob Edward; Joshua York in George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream; Steven King’s Kurt Barlow from Salem’s Lot; that cute little Swedish girl Eli from Let the Right One In, and so many more.
Our recommended books will introduce you to vampires from all swaths of society and cultures around the world. Perhaps a dab of holy water behind each ear?
Top image courtesy of Cederic X/Unsplash.
Want to keep up with our book-related adventures? Sign up for our newsletter!
Can you help us? If you like this article, share it your friends!
Strong Sense of Place is a website and podcast dedicated to literary travel and books we love. Reading good books increases empathy. Empathy is good for all of us and the amazing world we inhabit.
Strong Sense of Place is a listener-supported podcast. If you like the work we do, you can help make it happen by joining our Patreon! That'll unlock bonus content for you, too — including Mel's secret book reviews and Dave's behind-the-scenes notes for the latest Two Truths and a Lie.
This is a weekly email. If you'd like a quick alert whenever we update our blog, subscribe here.
We'll share enough detail to help you decide if a book is for you, but we'll never ruin plot twists or give away the ending.
This 30-page Reading Atlas takes you around the world with dozens of excellent books and gorgeous travel photos. Get your free copy when you subscribe to our newsletter.
Content on this site is © 2021 by Smudge Publishing, unless otherwise noted. Peace be with you, person who reads the small type.
_stoker.jpg)
