Vampire literature


Vampire literature covers the spectrum of literary work concerned principally with the subject of vampires. The literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre, which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron. Later influential works include the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire ; Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a lesbian vampire, Carmilla, and the masterpiece of the genre: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Some authors created a more "sympathetic vampire", with Varney being the first, and Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire as a more recent example.

History

18th century

Vampire fiction is rooted in the "vampire craze" of the 1720s and 1730s, which culminated in the somewhat bizarre official exhumations of suspected vampires Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole in Serbia under the Habsburg Monarchy. One of the first works of art to touch upon the subject is the short German poem The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, where the theme already has strong erotic overtones: a man whose love is rejected by a respectable and pious maiden threatens to pay her a nightly visit, drink her blood by giving her the seductive kiss of the vampire and thus prove to her that his teaching is better than her mother's Christianity. Furthermore, there have been a number of tales about a dead person returning from the grave to visit his/her beloved or spouse and bring them death in one way or another, the narrative poem Lenore by Gottfried August Bürger being a notable 18th-century example. One of its lines, Denn die Todten reiten schnell, was to be quoted in Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. A later German poem exploring the same subject with a prominent vampiric element was The Bride of Corinth by Goethe, a story about a young woman who returns from the grave to seek her betrothed:
The story is turned into an expression of the conflict between Heathendom and Christianity: the family of the dead girl are Christians, while the young man and his relatives are still pagans. It turns out that it was the girl's Christian mother who broke off her engagement and forced her to become a nun, eventually driving her to her death. The motive behind the girl's return as a "spectre" is that "e'en Earth can never cool down love". Goethe had been inspired by the story of Philinnion by Phlegon of Tralles, a tale from classical Greece. However, in that tale, the youth is not the girl's betrothed, no religious conflict is present, no actual sucking of blood occurs, and the girl's return from the dead is said to be sanctioned by the gods of the Underworld. She relapses into death upon being exposed, and the issue is settled by burning her body outside of the city walls and making an apotropaic sacrifice to the deities involved.
The first mention of vampires in English literature appears in Robert Southey's monumental oriental epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer, where the main character Thalaba's deceased beloved Oneiza turns into a vampire, although that occurrence is actually marginal to the story. It has been argued that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel has influenced the development of vampire fiction: the heroine Christabel is seduced by a female supernatural being called Geraldine who tricks her way into her residence. Though Coleridge never finished the poem, some argue that his intended plot had Geraldine eventually trying to marry Christabel after having assumed the appearance of Christabel's absent lover. The story bears a remarkable resemblance to the overtly vampiric story of Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

19th century

In a passage in his epic poem The Giaour, Lord Byron alludes to the traditional folkloric conception of the vampire as a being damned to suck the blood and destroy the life of its nearest relations:
Byron also composed an enigmatic fragmentary story, published as "A Fragment" in 1819 as part of the Mazeppa collection, concerning the mysterious fate of an aristocrat named Augustus Darvell whilst journeying in the Orient—as his contribution to the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, between him, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori. This story provided the basis for The Vampyre by Polidori. Byron's own wild life became the model for Polidori's undead protagonist Lord Ruthven. According to A. Asbjorn Jon, "the choice of name is presumably linked to Lady Caroline Lamb's earlier novel Glenarvon, where it was used for a rather ill disguised Byronesque character".
An unauthorized sequel to Polidori's tale by Cyprien Bérard called Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires was attributed to Charles Nodier. Nodier himself adapted "The Vampyre" into the first vampire stage melodrama, Le Vampire. Unlike Polidori's original story, Nodier's play was set in Scotland. This, in turn, was adapted by the English melodramatist James Planché as The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles at the Lyceum, also set in Scotland. Planché introduced the "vampire trap" as a way for the title fiend to appear in a dream at the beginning and then to vanish into the earth at his destruction. Nodier's play was also the basis of an opera called Der Vampyr by the German composer Heinrich Marschner, who set the story in a more plausible Wallachia. Planché in turn translated the libretto of this opera into English in 1827, where it was performed at the Lyceum also. Alexandre Dumas, père later redramatized the story in a play also entitled Le Vampire. Another theatrical vampire of this period was "Sir Alan Raby", who is the lead character of The Vampire, a play by Dion Boucicault. Boucicault himself played the lead role to great effect, though the play itself had mixed reviews. Queen Victoria, who saw the play, described it in her diary as "very trashy".
An important later example of 19th-century vampire fiction is the penny dreadful epic Varney the Vampire, featuring Sir Francis Varney as the vampire. In this story, we have the first example of the standard trope in which the vampire comes through the window at night and attacks a maiden as she lies sleeping. Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is suspected of being a vampire by his housekeeper at one point, which he immediately laughs off as "absurd nonsense".
Fascinating erotic fixations are evident in Sheridan Le Fanu's classic novella Carmilla, which features a female vampire with lesbian inclinations who seduces the heroine Laura while draining her of her vital fluids. Le Fanu's story is set in the Duchy of Styria. Such central European locations became a standard feature of vampire fiction.
Another important example of the development of vampire fiction can be found in three seminal novels by Paul Féval: Le Chevalier Ténèbre, La Vampire and La Ville Vampire. Marie Nizet's Le Capitaine Vampire features a Russian officer, Boris Liatoukine, who is a vampire.
In German literature, one of the most popular novels was Hans Wachenhusen's Der Vampyr - Novelle aus Bulgarien, which, on account of the author's first-hand experience of Ottoman society, includes a detailed description of the multicultural society of Bulgaria, and which contains an atmosphere that is "in some parts comparable to Dracula".
The most famous Serbian vampire was Sava Savanović from a folklore-inspired novel Ninety Years Later by Milovan Glišić, first published in 1880.

''Dracula''

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease, with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Britain where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.
The character of Count Dracula is based upon Vlad Dracula III, also known as Vlad Ţepeş', a notorious 15th-century Wallachian warlord, or Voivode. Unlike the historical personage, however, Stoker located his Count Dracula in a castle near the Borgo Pass in Transylvania, and ascribed to that area the supernatural aura it retains to this day in the popular imagination.
Stoker likely drew inspiration from Irish myths of blood-sucking creatures. He was also influenced by Le Fanu's Carmilla''. Le Fanu was Stoker's editor when Stoker was a theater critic in Dublin, Ireland. Like Le Fanu, Stoker created compelling female vampire characters such as Lucy Westenra and the Brides of Dracula.
Stoker's vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing was a strong influence on subsequent vampire literature.

20th century

Though Stoker's Count Dracula remained an iconic figure, especially in the new medium of cinema, as in the film Nosferatu, 20th-century vampire fiction went beyond traditional Gothic horror and explored new genres such as science fiction. An early example of this is Gustave Le Rouge's Le prisonnier de la planète Mars and its sequel La guerre des vampires, in which a native race of bat-winged, blood-drinking humanoids is found on Mars. In the 1920 novella La Jeune Vampire, by J.-H. Rosny aîné, vampirism is explained as a form of possession by souls originating in another universe known simply as the Beyond.
Possibly the most influential example of modern vampire science fiction is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. The novel is set in a future Los Angeles overrun with undead cannibalistic/bloodsucking beings. The protagonist is the sole survivor of a pandemic of a bacterium that causes vampirism. He must fight to survive attacks from the hordes of nocturnal creatures, discover the secrets of their biology, and develop effective countermeasures. The novel was adapted into three movies: The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price in 1964, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in 1971, and I am Legend starring Will Smith in 2007.
The latter part of the 20th century saw the rise of multi-volume vampire epics. The first of these was Gothic romance writer Marilyn Ross's Barnabas Collins series loosely based on the contemporary American TV soap opera Dark Shadows. It also set the trend for seeing vampires as poetic, tragic heroes rather than as the traditional embodiment of evil. This formula was followed in the popular Vampire Chronicles series of novels by Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's massive Saint-Germain series. Ross, Rice and Yarbro set the trend for multi-volume vampire sagas which are now a stock feature of mass-market fiction. Rice's work also saw the beginning of the convergence of traditional Gothic ideas with the modern Gothic subculture and a more explicit exploration of the transgressive sexualities which had always been implicit in vampire fiction.
The 1981 novel The Hunger continued the theme of open sexuality and examined the biology of vampires, suggesting that their special abilities were the result of physical properties of their blood. The novel suggested that not all vampires were undead humans, but some were a separate species that had evolved alongside humans. This interpretation of vampires has since then been used in several science-fiction stories dealing with vampires, most famously the Blade movie series. The 1982 novel Fevre Dream by notable author George R. R. Martin tells the tale of a race of living vampires, extremely human-like but obligate predators on humans, set in the Mississippi Riverboat era, where one of them has developed a dietary supplement to "cure" them, and is fighting for the right and opportunity to distribute it.
Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series returns to Stoker's Count Dracula, looking at an alternate world where Dracula defeated Van Helsing's group and conquered Britain, and gives the genre a somewhat postmodern spin. The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created and largely written by Joss Whedon, also explored vampire folklore in the light of postmodern and feminist theory, defining the 'condition' as humans who were made to drink vampire blood after the vampire drinks from them, with turned vampires being essentially demons possessing human corpses; Buffy and its spin-off, Angel, also feature the character of Angel in a prominent role, with Angel being a vampire who was cursed with his soul, restoring his capacity for compassion, but also forcing him to live with the guilt of what he did as a regular vampire.
Post-Colonial perspectives on the vampire legend are provided in Nalo Hopkinson's novel Brown Girl In The Ring, which features the Soucouyant, a vampire of Caribbean folklore, and in Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep and its sequel The Living Blood.
One of the more traditional vampire works of the 20th century is Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, which re-imagines the archetypal Dracula-type story in a modern American small town setting. King acknowledged the influence of Dracula on the work, as well as the violent, pre-Comics Code vampires portrayed in horror comics such as those released by E.C. Comics.
In 1989, a comprehensive bibliography of vampire literature was published - Margaret L Carter's The Vampire in Literature. A Critical Bibliography.

21st century

Many books based on vampires are still being published, including several continuing series. Paranormal romance, inspired by Anne Rice, but mostly dropping the open sexuality of her characters in favor of more conventional sexual roles, is a remarkable contemporary publishing phenomenon.Romances with handsome vampires as the male lead include Lynsay Sands' Argeneau family series, Charlaine Harris The Southern Vampire Mysteries series, and Christine Feehan's Carpathian series. However, Laurell K. Hamilton's ' series has again shifted the genre boundaries from romance back toward the territory of erotica.
The occult detective subgenre is represented by Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files fantasy series, and Charlaine Harris's The Southern Vampire Mysteries.
In the field of juvenile and young adult literature, Darren Shan wrote a 12-book series about a boy who becomes a vampire's assistant, beginning with Cirque Du Freak and ending with Sons of Destiny. A film adaptation has been made of the first three books called '. He is also currently writing a prequel to the Saga, a series of four books all about Larten Crepsley starting with Birth of a Killer and finishing with Brothers to the Death. Ellen Schreiber created a young adult series about Raven Madison and her vampire boyfriend Alexander Sterling, starting with Vampire Kisses. In Scott Westerfeld's young adult novel Peeps, the protagonist carries a contagious parasite that causes vampire-like behavior.
The king of vampires, Count Dracula, also continues to inspire novelists, for example Elizabeth Kostova in The Historian.
Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist's critically praised vampire story Låt Den Rätte Komma In about the relationship of a 12-year-old boy with a 200-year-old vampire child has now been translated into English as Let the Right One In and a film adaptation has been produced. The story takes place in Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm. This particular novel does not follow the modern romantic trend, and instead focuses on a human-vampire friendship. Crucially, it retains many of the vampire traits popularized by Dracula.
Dimitris Lyacos's second book of the Poena Damni trilogy With the People from the Bridge handles the vampire legend in the context of a ritualistic post-theatrical drama performance.In a dystopian setting, under the arches of a derelict bridge, a group of social outcastspresent an unconventional, non-Gothic version of a vampire drawing from ancient Greek religionand literature, Christian eschatology as well as traveler reports of vampire epidemics in the Balcans.The story is recounted in a minimalist style that makes no explicit mention to vampires, the undead, graves or the Underworld, conveying, nevertheless, the underlying theme unambiguously and in striking physical detail.
Peter Watts' novel Blindsight has explored a scientific basis for vampires, depicting them as an evolutionary offshoot from humanity who were not the dominant species on the planet solely due to an evolutionary glitch making them averse to Euclidean geometry.
In recent years, vampire fiction has been one of many supernatural fiction genres used in the creation of mashups. These works combine either a pre-existing text or a historic figure with elements of genre fiction. One of the best-known of these works is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, in which the historic Abraham Lincoln has a fictional secret identity as a hunter of evil vampires.
In 2019, author P. J. Parker brought the vampyre legend full circle with the publication of Origin of the Vampyre - a time-blurring mystery and paranormal romance delving into the life of Doctor John Polidori, his novella The Vampyre, and the occurrences after The Year Without a Summer which unearthed the horror of the vampyre.

Traits of vampires in fiction

The traits of the literary vampire have evolved from the often repulsive figures of folklore. Fictional vampires can be romantic figures, often described as elegant and sexy. This is in stark contrast to the vampire of Eastern European folklore, which was a horrifying animated corpse. However, as in folklore, the literary vampire is sustained by drinking blood. They do not need other food, water, or even oxygen. They are sometimes portrayed as being unable to eat human food at all, forcing them to either avoid public dining or mime chewing and eating to deceive their mortal victims. The fictional vampire, however, often has a pale appearance rather than the dark or ruddy skin of folkloric vampires and their skin is cool to the touch. As in folklore, literary vampires can usually be warded off with garlic and symbols of the Christian faith, such as holy water, a crucifix, or a rosary.
According to literary scholar Nina Auerbach in Our Vampires, Ourselves, the influence of the moon was seen as dominant in the earliest examples of vampire literature:
Bram Stoker's Dracula was hugely influential in its depiction of vampire traits, some of which are described by the novel's vampire expert Abraham Van Helsing.
Dracula has the ability to change his shape at will, his featured forms in the novel being that of a wolf, bat, mist and fog. He can also crawl up and down the vertical external walls of his castle in the manner of a lizard. One very famous trait that Stoker added is the inability to be seen in mirrors, which is not found in traditional Eastern European folklore. Dracula also had protruding teeth, though was preceded in this by Varney the Vampire and Carmilla.
In the novel, the vampire hunter Van Helsing prescribes that a vampire be destroyed by a wooden stake through the heart, decapitation, drowning, or incineration. The vampire's head must be removed from its body, the mouth stuffed with garlic and holy water or relics, the body drawn and quartered, then burned and spread into the four winds, with the head buried on hallowed ground. The destruction of the vampire Lucy follows the three-part process enjoined by Van Helsing. Traditional vampire folklore, followed by Stoker in Dracula, does not usually hold that sunlight is fatal to vampires, though they are nocturnal. It is also notable in the novel that Dracula can walk about in the daylight, in bright sunshine, though apparently in discomfort and without the ability to use most of his powers, like turning into mist or a bat. He is still strong and fast enough to struggle with and escape from most of his male pursuers. It is only with the 1922 film Nosferatu that daylight is depicted as deadly to vampires.Such scenes in vampire films, most especially the closing scene of the 1958 film Dracula in which Count Dracula is burnt by the sun, were very influential on later vampire fiction. For instance, Anne Rice's vampire Lestat and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain both avoid the lethal effects of daylight by staying closeted indoors during the day.
A well-known set of special powers and weaknesses is commonly associated with vampires in contemporary fiction. There is a tendency, however, for authors to pick and choose the ones they like, or find more realistic ones, and have their characters ridicule the rest as absurd. For example, in the movie Blade, the vampire hunter Blade tells Karen Jenson what kills vampires, and dismisses tactics seen in vampire movies as ineffective.Some vampires can fly. This power may be supernatural levitation, or it may be connected to the vampire's shape-shifting ability. Some traditions hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless he or she is invited in. Generally, a vampire needs be invited in only once and then can come and go at will. Stephen King's novel Salem's Lot explored an unusual direction with this myth in having one of the protagonists revoke a vampire's invitation to a house; the vampire was forced to flee the building immediately. This is also featured in the American TV series True Blood, where Sookie withdraws her invitation on a number of occasions, causing vampires to be thrown out by supernatural forces. Also, in The Vampire Diaries when a newly turned vampire wakes up in a house that he was not invited into, he immediately flees.
Some tales maintain that vampires must return to a coffin or to their "native soil" before sunrise to take their rest safely. Others place native soil in their coffins, especially if they have relocated. Still other vampire stories, such as Le Fanu's Carmilla, maintain that vampires must return to their coffins, but sleep in several inches of blood as opposed to soil. Vampires are generally held to be unable to bear children, though the concept of a "half vampire" and similar creatures does exist in folklore and in some modern fiction. Some fictional vampires are fascinated with counting, an idea derived from folk stories about vampires being compelled to stop and count any spilled grain that they find in their path. The most famous fictional counting vampire is likely the Muppet character Count von Count on television's Sesame Street. Other examples include a fifth season episode of the X-Files titled Bad Blood, and the Discworld novel, Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett. Some modern fictional vampires are portrayed as having magical powers beyond those originally assigned by myth, typically also possessing the powers of a witch or seer. Such examples include Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Olivia Nightshade from The Nightshade Chronicles. Also, vampires from the Vampire Academy books, also known as the moroi, are skilled in elemental magic. Also, in the Twilight series, certain vampires appear to have special gifts like Edward, Alice, Bella, that are either supernatural or evolved from their own personalities like Victoria.

Vampire hybrids

The Dhampir, the offspring of a vampire and a human known from Serbian folklore, has been popularized in recent fiction.

Literature

Poems

There are several recent series in vampire fiction, of variable literary quality. They tend to either take the form of direct sequels to the first book published or detail the ongoing adventures of particular characters.
White Wolf, a maker of role-playing games, releases novels set in the fantasy world of its game. These series of novels were released in 13-book sets, each corresponding to one of the 13 clans of vampires in their game universe.

Juvenile fiction

Comic books and graphic novels which feature vampires include Vampirella, Morbius, the Living Vampire, The Tomb of Dracula, Blade, I...Vampire, Hellsing, Vampire Girl, 30 Days of Night, Chibi Vampire, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Rosario + Vampire, Vampire Knight, Blood Alone, Dracula vs. King Arthur, Dance in the Vampire Bund, : Guilty Pleasures, Half Dead, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Black Rose Alice, Nosferatu, and He's My Only Vampire.
Proinsias Cassidy, the supporting lead male in Garth Ennis' comic book series Preacher, is a vampire of Irish origin. In addition, many major superheroes have faced vampire supervillains at some point. In the Belgo-French comic Le Bal du rat mort,police inspector Jean Lamorgue is a hybrid vampire and he is a king of rats. He is guiding an invasion of rats in Ostend and he sucks the blood of his human victims.
In 2009, Zuda Comics launched La Morté Sisters, a story of teenage vampirism in a Catholic orphanage taking place in South Philadelphia. The story follows new girl Maddie in a world of ninja nuns and black magic.
American Vampire, created by Scott Snyder, was published in 2010. It explores the idea of the evolution of vampires, leading to new species throughout American history.

Magazines

Magazines which feature vampires include Bite me magazine. Typical features include interviews with vampire actors, features on famous vampire film classics, vampire-related news, forthcoming vampire film and book releases.
Defunct vampire magazines include Crimson ; Journal of the Dark, Father Sebastiaan's Vampyre Magazine and The Velvet Vampyre.