Essential Vampire Fiction Vol. 4
Explore Essential Vampire Fiction Vol. 4—a curated list of must-read vampire books. Discover timeless tales, dark romance, and thrilling undead lore for every fan of gothic horror and supernatural fiction.
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Dead on My Feet
by Wm. Mark Simmons
The living dead were making his life a living hell-the hilarious sequel to One Foot in the Grave. First time in paperback. A year ago, Chris Csejthe (pronounced "Say-thee") was completely human-then a blood transfusion with the Lord of the Undead changed everything. Now he is a hunted man, sought by human and vampire alike for the secrets he knows and the powers that his mutated blood may bestow. So far he's dodged undead assassins, werewolves, a 6,000-year-old Egyptian necromancer, and Vlad Dracula himself. But now he's really got problems. The dead are turning up on his doorstep after dark to ask for justice and the police want to know where all those corpses are coming from. Undead terrorists are testing a doomsday virus on his new hometown and he's caught in the crossfire between a white supremacist militia and the resurrected Civil War dead. His werewolf lover, jealous of his dead wife's ghost, has left him. And the centuries-old and still very beautiful (and very deadly) Countess Bathory is determined to have his uniquely transformed blood for her own dark purposes. Now, more than ever, life sucks!
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Habeas Corpses
by Wm. Mark Simmons
¿Mark Simmons, who never met a wisecrack, pun, or pop culture reference he didn¿t like, explores different degrees of deadness in his latest Christopher Cjesthe novel. Poor Chris . . . if he¿s not being made unwilling ruler of the vampires, he¿s discorporated and floating through walls. Lupe the Werewolf, Suki the cat/vampire, the voluptuous Deidre, and, oh yes, Teresa¿s head . . . all are back for this lates event-packed romp through a vivid world that leaps into existence every time we open a Simmons book. ¿Charlaine Harris ¿. . . manages to combine enough wacky hilarity to satisfy a Terry Pratchett fan, and a plethora of puns guaranteed to make a Piers Anthony buff groan. . . . Mark might even have created himself a new genre¿cybercafé.¿ ¿Mercedes Lackey ¿. . . vampire Chris Haim has more problems than merely protecting his secret . . . a jealous werewolf can ruin your whole day. Plots and subplots and vignettes abound . . . fans of the early Terry Pratchett or Eric Flint's Joe fantasies will enjoy the humorous bits.¿ ¿Publishers Weekly ¿[Chris Cjesthe] is back for a new and even greater (and funnier) adventure. . . . Snappy dialogue, lots of amusing details, a clever plot, and a generally witty sense of humor combine to make this one of those rare novels that combine levity and the supernatural in just the right balance.¿ ¿Chronicle ¿Readers who desire something off beat but humorous in their fantasy/horror literature will want to read Dead on My Feet [prequel to Habeas Corpses]. . . this book is fun.¿ ¿Midwest Book Review ¿[Dear on My Feet] works because it is simply over the top . . . I love the way Mr. Simmons plays with the standard action scenes¿for instance a philosophy discussion during a car chase. . . .¿ ¿Philadelphia Weekly Press
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Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity
by Brian M. Stableford
The great detective Sherlock Holmes, the reluctant vampire Count Dracula, the mercurial Oscar Wilde, the visionary H.G. Wells, and many other figures from the literary firmament, become pawns and players in a conflict that spans the entire course of universal history.
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Dracula
by Bram Stoker
After discovering the double identity of the wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire.
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Blood Secrets
by Karen E. Taylor
Deirdre is a vampire who sun-lights as a dress designer in Manhattan. Not all vampires are as civilized as she. Another vampire is one the loose, draining his victims and pointing the finger of suspicion at Deirdre. She'll use her feminine wiles to track him down and show him how much deadlier the female species can be.
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Night Blood
by James M. Thompson
In Maine in 1820, a young woodcutter is lost in a blizzard and finds shelter in a recluse's isolated cabin. There, a strange-tasting brew turns him into a vampire. Now, more than 160 years later in modern-day Houston, his immortality is threatened by a deadly blood disease. Reinventing himself as a hematologist, he races against time to find a cure that will save him.
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Second Sunrise
by David Thurlo
Lee Nez is a New Mexico State police officer who is also a nightwalker, a Navajo vampire. When a complicated case goes bad, Lee draws the attention of FBI agent Diane Lopez. Together, they are soon on the hunt for three vampires - including the one who created Lee. Take his current cases, Lee suspects that the vampire who created him during World War II is back in the U.S., searching for a cache of stolen plutonium. And Lee's being stalked by the remnants of a pack of skinwalkers - Navajo shapeshifters - who are literally out for his blood.
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Nightlife
by Rob Thurman
“There are monsters among us. There always have been and there always will be. I’ve known that ever since I can remember, just like I’ve always known I was one… …Well, half of one, anyway.” Welcome to the Big Apple. There’s a troll under the Brooklyn Bridge, a boggle in Central Park, and a beautiful vampire in a penthouse on the Upper East Side—and that’s only the beginning. Of course, most humans are oblivious to the preternatural nightlife around them, but Cal Leandros is only half-human. His father’s dark lineage is the stuff of nightmares—and he and his entire otherworldly race are after Cal. Why? Cal hasn’t exactly wanted to stick around long enough to find out. He and his half-brother Niko have managed to stay a step ahead for three years, but now Cal’s dad has found them again. And Cal is about to learn why they want him, why they’ve always wanted him…for he is the key to unleashing their hell on earth. The fate of the human world will be decided in the fight of Cal’s life…
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Blindsight
by Peter Watts
Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
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23 Hours
by David Wellington
After killing her former mentor-turned-vampire, Caxton had been nearly left for dead. Taken to prison for assaulting a convict, she now faces her most harrowing hours yet after the oldest living vampire infiltrates the prison--and it's Caxton's blood she wants.
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13 Bullets
by David Wellington
The first book in the Laura Caxton Vampire series from the author of the Monster Island trilogy. All the official reports say that vampires are dead--extinct since the late ’80s, when FBI agent Arkeley defeated the last vampire in a fight that nearly killed him. But when state trooper Laura Caxton calls the FBI looking for help in the middle of the night, Arkeley is unsurprised to hear that it sounds like a vampire attack. He’s been expecting such a call to come eventually. Sure, it has been years since any signs of an attack, but Arkeley knows what most people don’t: there is one left. In an abandoned asylum she is rotting, plotting, and biding her time in a way that only the undead can. Laura Caxton is out of her league on this case and more than a little afraid. Arkeley made it clear there is only one way out. The worst thing is the feeling that the vampires want more than just her blood. They want her for a reason, one she can’t guess; a reason her sphinxlike partner knows but won’t say; a reason she has to find out-or die trying.
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Vampire Zero
by David Wellington
One man stood between them and us. U.S. Marshal Jameson Arkeley—the country’s foremost authority on vampires—taught police investigator and vampire fighter Laura Caxton everything she knows about monsters. After a bloody war visited upon Gettysburg by an army of vampires, Arkeley gave up his own life to save others. Except he didn’t exactly die . . . Arkeley accepted the curse and is now a vampire himself. What’s worse, he’s the savviest vampire ever—he knows all the tricks better than anyone. Caxton is now faced with the task of destroying him. But Arkeley knows all her tactics too; after all, he taught them to her. Caxton realizes she must finish Arkeley before he succeeds in his quest to exterminate his own family, one member at a time. But even more important, she has to prevent him from becoming a beast exponentially more dangerous—a Vampire Zero. The author of 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins, David Wellington takes the Laura Caxton series to a whole new level in this action-packed third volume.
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The Space Vampires
by Colin Wilson
Vampires from outer space suck the body's life force with a kiss of death.
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The Keep
by F. Paul Wilson
While investigating the mysterious mutilations and killings of Nazi soldiers at a garrison in Romania, an elite SS extermination squad finds a terrifying evil at work and summons a folklore expert to help--a man who happens to be Jewish. Reissue.
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Midnight Mass
by F. Paul Wilson
Vampires have always lived in Eastern Europe. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, they began to spread across the continent, then the world, turning whole populations into vampires--or human cattle. Having overrun India, the far East, and the great cities of North and South America, the forces of Night are now spreading into the countryside to consolidate their conquest. In a town on the New Jersey shore, the vampires have just arrived, along with their human henchmen, the cowboys, who round up human cattle for the overlords in return for the promise of eternal life---later. For the vampires wish only a few of their own kind to rule, and feed. The rest of humanity are to be helpless herds, the source of the blood of life. Falsely accused of abuse, Father Dan is drunk in a basement waiting for the end. His superior has betrayed the local Catholic congregation and become a vampire. Sister Carolyn has become a formidable killer of cowboys and vampires. Dan's niece, escaped from the conquest of New York, has made her way south to find him. Brought together by Rabbi Zev Wolpin, who is shaken by the vampires' fear of the cross and holy water, they plan their resistance. Against all odds, they discover that there just might be a way for humanity to really fight back. But first they will have to kill the vampire king of New York.
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Out of the House of Life
by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Three thousand years ago, amidst the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt, they called him Demon. Today he is known as the Count Saint-Germain--a man of great power and greater mystery. For over 15 years, readers and critics have praised Yarbro's novels of Saint-Germain. Now, the secrets of his mysterious past--and distant nights along the shores of the Nile--are revealed.
