The continuation of Charlaine Harris's bestselling vampire novel "Dead Until Dark", also known for its screen adaptation in "True Blood" TV-series. The books describe an alternate history which assumes that the supernatural is real and that vampires have only been public knowledge for a couple of years.
Books 2-9. Recommended for supernatural fans and adult readers.
Throughout the world there is a common belief that the dead may return to life. In Europe the most exotic form of this belief is the legend of the vampire. In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires—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. Analyzing these reports, Barber offers
for the first time a scientific explanation for the origin of the vampire legends. The accounts compiled here by Barber of exhumations of suspected vampires include descriptions of blood on the lips of the dead body,how the corpse cried out when a stake was driven into its heart, and how the corpse partly rose from the grave. These descriptions led to further assumptions about vampires; that after coming to life again, they would prey on the living, sucking their blood or killing them in other ways. Barber studies the descriptions of exhumed cadavers in light of what is now known about forensic pathology and shows that they are clinically possible. Barber thus argues that the lore about vampires is an elaborate folk-hypothesis that sought to make sense out of a wide variety of natural phenomena, including the events of decomposition.
His book will be fascinating reading for scientists and anthropologists as well as for everyone interested in folklore. Paul Barber, a former teacher of German language and folklore at Princeton University and Occidental College, is a writer.
In Blood Thirst: One Hundred Years of Vampire Fiction, Leonard Wolf gathers thirty tales in which vampires of all varieties make their ghastly presence felt. From Lafcadio Hearn, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Edith Wharton, August Derleth, and Ray Bradbury to such contemporary masters as Anne Rice, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Woody Allen, and in settings as diverse as rural New England and outer space, this collection offers readers a blood-curling compendium of the best vampire fiction since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Organized into six categories--The Classic Adventure Tale, The Psychic Vampire, The Science Fiction Vampire, The Non-Human Vampire, The Comic Vampire, and The Heroic Vampire--the collection illustrates how the vampire's ability to draw into itself such a richness of symbolic meanings may account for the enduring appeal of the literature written about it. Here, then, is the definitive collection for aficionados and novices alike to sink their teeth into.
Tired of the same old vampires? Check out Anne Rice's new race of undead bloodsuckers, independent of the Lestat series. Her alterna-vamp books began with Pandora, but the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, Vittorio, is truly a new beginning--a more controlled story and probably the best of her last half-dozen books.
Rice has called Vittorio her vampire version of Romeo and Juliet. The hunky Vittorio is sweet 16 and "incalculably rich" in 15th-century Italy, the epoch of the Medicis and Vittorio's favorite painter, madly passionate Filippo Lippi. Florence is to Vittorio what New Orleans is to Interview with the Vampire.
Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."
Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.
