The top 10 vampire books

This article is more than 10 years old

From the eternally enthralling tale of Dracula, to femmes fatales spooking in the name of feminine sexuality, horror author Lauren Owen selects her favourite vampiric tales

The vampire is naturally versatile: as a literary figure, it has taken on many forms, adapting for new generations and successfully making the jump into film, television, and comics. Modern readers can now find vampires in every conceivable genre, from paranormal romance to gritty horror, from contemporary humour to historical pastiche. But the vampire is also versatile in what it signifies. Dracula, of course, is the prime example – it can be read as a story of sexual transgression, invasion fears, resentment of women’s increased freedom, repressed homoeroticism – with many other interpretations besides.

Gary Oldman as Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Francis Ford Coppola’s very horny vampire epic

Thirty years before Megalopolis, there was Coppola’s other deranged, maximalist fable about love lost, starring Gary Oldman as the terrifying Count

Andrew Fraser

Tuesday 19 November 2024

Dracula / The Untold Story at Leeds Playhouse XLISTO 2021

THEATRE | Dracula 

The Untold Story at Leeds Playhouse

Richard Horsman

1 October 2021 

It’s New Year’s Eve in 1965. A jaded cop is in no mood to hear the deluded ramblings of a woman who’s just confessed to a murder. In the hands of multimedia theatre maestros IMITATING THE DOG at LEEDS PLAYHOUSE this is just the start of a surreal and nightmarish journey into the past. RICHARD HORSMAN went along for the ride.

Dracula by Bram Stoker / A masterpiece

DRACULA BY BRAM STOKER

“Dracula” by Bram Stoker is a Gothic novel that tells the terrifying story of Count Dracula, a vampire who travels from Transylvania to England, unleashing a wave of horror and mystery. Through diaries and letters, the novel follows a group of characters led by Professor Van Helsing, who desperately struggles to stop Dracula and his evil influence. This classic work of horror explores themes of superstition, science, and the nature of evil, leaving an enduring mark on popular culture and the horror genre.

 

Gary Oldman

Review

Bram Stoker’s Dracula review – Gary Oldman is Pierrot from hell in blood-red 90s take

This article is more than 2 years old

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 all-star retelling features an outstanding performance from Oldman as the tormented count

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 5 October 2024

Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire tale is now revived in cinemas for its 30th anniversary, with Gary Oldman the fierce and anguished count who hundreds of years ago renounced God and embraced an eternity of parasitic horror in his rage at the unjust death of his countess (played by Winona Ryder). Dressed like the Pierrot from hell in his vast Transylvanian castle, Dracula then buys property in Victorian London, and appears there in the style of a sinister young dandy, on the scent of a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: the winsome Mina (Ryder again), fiancee to the equally demure young lawyer who journeyed to Romania to draw up Dracula’s contracts: Jonathan, played by Keanu Reeves.

Beam Stoker / Reader stumbles on Dracula’s ancestors in a Dublin library

 

Bram Stoker

Reader stumbles on Dracula’s ancestors in a Dublin library

The unknown Bram Stoker story Gibbet Hill, published soon before the author began working on Dracula, has eerie echoes of his vampire classic

Ella Creamer

Sat 19 Oct 2024 00.00 BST

In a Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by Dracula author Bram Stoker he believed no living person had ever read.

Book Review 031 / Dracula by Bram Stoker

 

Dracula 

by Bram Stoker

1897

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 31 / Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

John Pistelli
17 October 2019

Though “undiscovered” and “forgotten” works are thrust at us from every corner, I find that the most startling books are often the most famous, the most classic. Supposedly so well known they no longer merit study—we might as well throw them in the trash—they are in reality so omnipresent that we don’t closely attend to them. Their messages skulk and lurk in plain sight, like Count Dracula sauntering through central London.

 

Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction

From Bram Stoker to Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist selects the best writing about a subject 'central to much of our lives and indeed life itself'

Rowan Somerville
Wed 15 Dec 2010 12.21 GMT

Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her, described by the Economist as "deceptively simple in plot and singularly musical in its voice, it is a study of the place where our past has become our present. A summer read to be kept – and visited in the dark days of winter..." Last month, the novel followed authors including John Updike and Norman Mailer in winning the Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award.

"Most adults are interested in sex. I am. My father was, and said as much to me when he was 92. I suspect that you are too. You're reading this after all. Being so central to much of our lives and indeed life itself, it is a valid and important topic for fiction.

"The challenge of writing about sex is to evoke the physicality, the yearning, the counterpoint between magnificent operatic grandiosity and ludicrous bestial grunting – without resorting to cliché. As the American author Elizabeth Benedict wrote: 'A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.' As an enthusiastic reader and a writer too, my opinion is that it doesn't matter how weird things get as long as it remains original and feels authentic.

"Some of the sex in the books below works as a device for revealing the state of society, some is a device for characterisation; a way of revealing truths about characters that they themselves may not be able to see – but most of it is just about desire, lust and sex itself."

10. Platform by Michel Houellebecq (2003)

Strange perhaps to begin this list with a book I really dislike – but churlish I feel to leave it out when it is such a reflection of contemporary views. Bleak, cold and mechanical, it's sex in a world without spirit with a faint possibility of redemption through heartless shagging.

9. The Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)

A male fantasy of total female submission. It was hugely popular but also despised for its objectification of woman – the protagonist is called "O" – no more than a letter, a zero, an orifice. Half a century later it is discovered to be the work of a woman, Anne Desclos, who wrote not for publication but for the pleasure of her lover. It's fascinating: erotic, intense, in parts repellent, frequently pornographic and ultimately self-annihilating.

8. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982)

Aficionados the world over will laugh at my tentative and no doubt outdated steps into fiction about gay sex, but as a (so far) straight man this was my introduction. Beautiful language, powerful story; saucy too if you can let yourself go.

7. Thongs by Alexander Trocchi (1955)

I bought this because it was meant to be disgusting and then found it to be much more than that. I was disappointed and later inspired – although it is pretty grubby. It was published by the Olympia Press – a Parisian publishing company specialising in erotica and the avant-garde. Five of the 10 books on this list were first published by this extraordinary house along with a host of classics such as Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer and The Ginger Man .

6. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

This Victorian classic has never been out of print, spawning dozens of books, films and more recently all those camp US teen dramas where sexual passion is faintly camouflaged as bloodlust. The original is a superb gothic tale of repressed sexuality and the savagery of its release. Strange today, that a society can gaze calmly at surgically enhanced teenagers ripping out each others throats and gorging on blood but one naked breast in the American Superbowl and moral panic erupts.

5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence (1928)

Has to go in. Since everything's already been said about this, let's hear from a great poet: "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/ And The Beatles' first LP." (Philip Larkin "Annus Mirabilis")

4. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)

Short stories retelling traditional tales and uncovering the sexual politics within. Her sentences reclaim and radicalise patriarchal language: "her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks". Funny, original, and brilliant.

3. The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)

Unnerving, delicious, completely wrong, provocative, unbridled, surreal, graphically erotic, boundless and imaginative, indulgent and beautiful. What more can I say?

2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)

A work of art by our greatest living writer. The 19th century seen through a fiercely modern cinematic lens. Faber tears the gauze and the drawers off Victorian England with his skilful prose and virtuoso structure. Behold the wonderful heroine Sugar – complex, flaky of skin, keen of mind – ready to do what no one else will. A big book in every sense. Essential.

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Although about a sociopath's utterly self-serving "love" for a minor this is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. The force of the writing is unparalleled. The balance of humour and horror, sex and satire, irony and delusion is extraordinary, and to me, without flaw. Just as the narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert seduces Lolita through deceit and thus reveals himself, so we too are seduced, deceived and revealed to ourselves with an artistry and uncompromising cruelty that is an appropriate and profoundly moral commentary on society.

THE GUARDIAN

Bram Stoker / Dracula / I Condemn

Dracula
Flore Maquin

I Condemn

by Bram Stoker

"I condemn you to living death. To eternal hunger for living blood."

Bram Stoker / Dracula

Richard Matheson / I Am Legend is named vampire novel of the century

I Am Legend is named vampire novel of the century

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel bats off competition from Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire to win one-off Bram Stoker prize

Alison Flood
Tuesday 3 April 2012

Apologies to Stephenie Meyer and her sparkly crew of vampires; bad luck to Anne Rice and her bloodthirsty Lestat. Richard Matheson's story of a world overrun by the undead, I Am Legend, has been named vampire novel of the century.

The one-off prize was dreamed up by the Horror Writers Association in conjunction with the Stoker family estate to mark the centenary of Dracula creator Bram Stoker's death, and saw a jury chaired by Dracula expert Leslie S Klinger pick Matheson's 1954 novel over titles including Stephen King's Salem's Lot and Rice's Interview with a Vampire. The 86-year-old author could not attend the Bram Stoker awards ceremony in Salt Lake City this weekend due to ill health, but sent a video message thanking his fellow horror authors for the award, and revealing how his thrice-filmed story of a man alone in Manhattan battling hordes of vampires was first inspired by Stoker's own story.

"I am certainly honoured and delighted that you have chosen I Am Legend as the vampire novel of the century, which is a rather dubious but interesting distinction," said the author. "When I was a teenager I went to see Dracula with Bela Lugosi and at that time, even as a teenager, the thought occurred to me that if one vampire is scary, what if all the world were full of vampires?"

Matheson read Stoker's novel, he said, on nightly trips to the toilet while he was a soldier. "When I was in the army and the infantry during basic training I would go down to the latrine at night while the other soldiers were sleeping, and I would sit there reading Dracula: why, I don't know. I was pretty tired, I should have gone to sleep," he said. "I enjoyed it at the time, never knowing I was going to write a book about vampires and certainly not that it would be derived from the idea I had when I first saw Bela Lugosi."

Rice posted congratulations to Matheson on her Facebook page, describing his novel as "legendary", and saying the writer had "been an inspiration to me and to so many. He is a legend himself". The Interview with a Vampire author added that she didn't mind losing "to a man whose stories were inspiring me when I was still a kid writing everything with a ball point pen in a school notebook". King has previously said that Matheson was "the author who influenced me the most as a writer", and that I Am Legend was "an inspiration to me".

The ceremony also saw the Bram Stoker award for superior achievement in a novel handed to Joe McKinney's Flesh Eaters, about a zombie plague, with authors including Alan Moore, Peter Straub, King and even Joyce Carol Oates also snapping up prizes. Oates won the horror gong for superior achievement in a fiction collection for The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, six tales of suspense in which the title story sees an 11-year-old child kept in a basement by an older girl from her school, and told the world has ended.

THE GUARDIAN