Essential Vampire Fiction Vol. 3
Discover the 40 best vampire fiction books of all time in Essential Vampire Fiction Vol. 3—from Anne Rice's *Interview with the Vampire* and George R.R. Martin's *Fevre Dream* to Terry Pratchett's *Carpe Jugulum*. This curated list spans classic horror, dark fantasy, and modern must-reads, featuring iconic authors like Brian Lumley, Tanith Lee, and Richard Laymon. Whether you crave gothic classics like *Carmilla* or thrilling twists like *Let the Right One In*, this essential reading list is your ultimate guide to timeless vampire novels and unforgettable bloodsucking tales.
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The Traveling Vampire Show
by Richard Laymon
Three teenagers are determined to get in to see the Traveling Vampire Show when it arrives in their town in the summer of 1963. The promised highlight of the show is Valeria, the only living vampire in captivity. The teens go where they shouldn't, but they find much more than they ever expected.
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Dark Dance
by Tanith Lee
Drawn to the ominous house of Scarabae by the promise of passion, Rachaela soon finds herself a prisoner of her own desire, seduced into a dark and dangerous existence by a lover who bears her family name. Original.
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Vivia
by Tanith Lee
In medieval Eastern Europe, Vivia is claimed by a dark lord who weds her, seduces her, and makes her a vampire. Then Vivia's mentor abandons her and she is found by Zulgaris, a handsome prince. He marries her but he cannot cure her hunger for blood. Is she doomed? And what will her pregnancy mean?
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Carmilla
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The vampire novella "Carmilla" set in Austria is one of Le Fanu's best tales and greatly influenced Bram Stocker, who published Dracula 25 years later. This is definitively a great book and a must for the lovers of horror tales.
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Let the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Let the Right One In Takes Top Honors at Tribeca Film Festival and is now an Award-winning movie in both the U.S. and Sweden! It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day. But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door---a girl who has never seen a Rubik's Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . . .Sweeping top honors at film festivals all over the globe, director Tomas Alfredsson's film of Let the Right One In has received the same kind of spectacular raves that have been lavished on the book. American and Swedish readers of vampire fiction will be thrilled! Following the success in Sweden, this movie was remade starring Kodi Smit Mcpheem, Chloe Grace Moretz and Richard Jenkins under the new title Let Me In. The story has continued to reach new viewers in a London Musical and the book remains a vampire favorite among its readers.
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Necroscope
by Brian Lumley
Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying. In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge. The vampire's human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire's mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead. Dragosani works not for Ferenczy's freedom but world domination. he will rule the world with knowledge raped from the dead. His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living. To protect Harry, the dead will do anything--even rise from their graves!
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Fangland
by John Marks
As the popularity of Elizabeth Kostova's bestselling The Historian proves, there's always an audience bloodthirsty for quality, page-turning horror. Now, in a marvelously horrifying turn, John Marks-a former 60 Minutes producer-sinks his satirical teeth into twenty-first- century media. In Fangland, Evangeline Harker is an employee of the legendary TV news magazine The Hour. Sent on assignment to Transylvania, she delivers more than a story when mysterious e-mails, coffins, and a creepy guy named Torgu descend on the New York office. This darkly funny tale will appeal to vampire and horror aficionados as well as anyone who's fed up with what passes for "news" today.
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Fevre Dream
by George R. R. Martin
When struggling riverboat captain Abner Marsh receives an offer of partnership from a wealthy aristocrat, he suspects something's amiss. But when he meets the hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York, he is certain. For York doesn't care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh's dilapidated fleet. Nor does he care that he won't earn back his investment in a decade. York has his own reasons for wanting to traverse the powerful Mississippi. And they are to be none of Marsh's concern--no matter how bizarre, arbitrary, or capricious his actions may prove. Marsh meant to turn down York's offer. It was too full of secrets that spelled danger. But the promise of both gold and a grand new boat that could make history crushed his resolve--coupled with the terrible force of York's mesmerizing gaze. Not until the maiden voyage of his new sidewheeler Fevre Dream would Marsh realize he had joined a mission both more sinister, and perhaps more noble, than his most fantastic nightmare...and mankind's most impossible dream. Here is the spellbinding tale of a vampire's quest to unite his race with humanity, of a garrulous riverman's dream of immortality, and of the undying legends of the steamboat era and a majestic, ancient river.
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Gil's All Fright Diner
by A. Lee Martinez
Earl and Duke help Loretta with her on-going zombie problem.
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Sunshine
by Robin McKinley
Left to die in an abandoned mansion as the prey of a vampire, Sunshine is stunned to find herself unharmed and must come up with a way to save her undead host from the perils of the daylight world, in a seductive tale of supernatural desire from the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Hero and the Crown. Reprint.
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Glass Dragons
by Sean Mcmullen
One of Australia's leading genre writers delivers the second novel in his Moonworlds Saga, a fantasy epic of daunting skill and scope.
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Bloodsucking Fiends
by Christopher Moore
Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under an alley Dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching back, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realizes the decision has been made for her. Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that's where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, Indiana, Tommy (to his friends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen-turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful undead redhead walks through the door...and proceeds to rock Tommy's life—and afterlife—in ways he never thought possible.
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The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre
by John Polidori
`The Vampyre' was first published in 1819 in the London New Monthly Magazine. The present volume - a companion to Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine in World's Classics - selects thirteen other tales of the macabre first published in the leading London and Dublin magazines between 1819 and 1838. It includes Edward Bulwer's chilling account of the doppelganger, Letitia Landon's elegant reworking of the Gothic romance, William Carleton's terrifying description of an actual lynching, and James Hogg's ghoulish exploitation of the cholera epidemic of 1831-2.
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The Stress of Her Regard
by Tim Powers
When Michael Crawford discovers his bride brutally murdered in their wedding bed, he is forced to flee not only to prove his innocence, but to avoid the deadly embrace of a vampire who has claimed him as her true bridegroom. Joining forces with Byron, Keats, and Shelley in a desperate journey that crisscrosses Europe, Crawford desperately seeks his freedom from this vengeful lover who haunts his dreams and will not rest until she destroys all that he cherishes. Told in the guise of a secret history, this long-awaited tale of passion and terror is finally back in print after more than 20 years.
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Carpe Jugulum
by Terry Pratchett
It is rare and splendid event when an author is elevated from the underground into the international literary establishment. In the case of England's best-known and best-loved modern satirist, that event has been long overdue. Terry Pratchett's profoundly irreverent Discworld novels satirize and celebrate every aspect of life, modern and ancient, sacred and profane. Consistent number-one bestsellers in England, they have garnered him a secure position in the pantheon of humor along with Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Matt Groening, and Jonathan Swift. Even so distinguished an author as A. S. Byatt has sung his praises, calling Pratchett's intricate and delightful fictional Discworld "more complicated and satisfying than Oz." His latest satiric triumph, Carpe Jugulum, involves an exclusive royal snafu that leads to comic mayhem. In a fit of enlightenment democracy and ebullient goodwill, King Verence invites Uberwald's undead, the Magpyrs, into Lancre to celebrate the birth of his daughter. But once ensconced within the castle, these wine-drinking, garlic-eating, sun-loving modern vampires have no intention of leaving. Ever. Only an uneasy alliance between a nervous young priest and the argumentative local witches can save the country from being taken over by people with a cultivated bloodlust and bad taste in silk waistcoats. For them, there's only one way to fight. Go for the throat, or as the vampyres themselves say...Carpe Jugulum
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Stalking the Vampire
by Mike Resnick
In the imaginary Manhattan of Resnick's John Justin Mallory series, Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year. On this night when ghosts and goblins are out celebrating, detective Mallory must stalk the vampire who has threatened his assistant, Winnifred Carruthers, and killed her nephew.
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Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice
The spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author—the inspiration for the hit television series “A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth—the education of the vampire.”—Chicago Tribune Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write.
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Sins of the Blood
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
"The worlds that Cammie and her brother Ben live in collide, when she, a vampire slayer, and he, a beautiful and deadly predator, find each other after many years, separated since she drove the stake through her own father's heart."--Goodreads
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Vampire Vow
by Michael Schiefelbein
A savage and sensuous chronicle of a contemporary vampire seeking vengeance against God. Desperately in love with but rejected by the young Jesus, he turns on the citizens of Jerusalem in a frenzy of rape and violence. Two thousand years later, in the guise of a monk in an Appalachian monastery, his love is returned by Brother Michael. But his vows of vengeance drive him to violence on a level that leads to an investigation of the monastery. His quest to transform Brother Michael has consequences horrifying beyond mortal imagination.
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The Golden
by Lucius Shepard
Deviating from traditional tales that feature lonely vampires who prowl through human society in search of victims or solace, this account of vampires flourishing in their own "inhuman society" takes place in the year 1860, when their centuries-long breeding experiments have finally produced "The Golden," a mortal whose blood is perfect and powerful. Mobilized by the news of this discovery, aristocratic vampire clans arrive at the looming Castle Banat, where they plan to partake of the sublime blood. To their shock, the guests find that The Golden, a young girl, has been brutally murdered and her blood already drained. The story also follows the Inspector Michael Beheim--a recent vampire--assigned to track down the killer. Recounted in full 19th-century literary style with gothic elements and foreshadowing, the inspector navigates his way through the vampire world and the crime therein.