Recommend me some vampires!

November 22, 2024 7:32 AM

Recommend less well-known (possibly but not necessarily less-recent) vampire tales, print only. Picky criteria within.

So I've read the well-known vampire stories (Dracula, Carmilla, Good Lady Ducayne, etc) that are frequently anthologized. I'm hoping that there are other vampire stories out there that meet these criteria. I suspect that these will be mostly older stories.

- Not too gory - scary is okay, but not a lot of gore
- Not romance/"sexy vampires" - there are lots of romance novels with, like, hunky vampires, and lots of urban fantasy novels with a "Jane was a vampire - but that didn't mean she wasn't hungry for love!" plotlines. Romance elements are okay, but dating-while-vampire and dating-a-vampire should not be primary plot points.

- The vampire may or may not be the hero, but if the vampire is the hero, they should not use whedon-esque snappy dialogue. No wisecracking!


- Pastiche is a positive - if someone wrote it in 2005 in the manner of 1900, that's fine
- Semi-vampirism is okay - like "Good Lady Ducayne" is not technically about a vampire-vampire but rather a science vampire.

My favorite vampire stories are probably "Good Lady Ducayne", EF Benson's "The Room In The Tower" and an early version of The Withrow Chronicles that I don't think is available online anymore. This one is probably the closest to "funny urban fantasy vampire" that I will enjoy.

Also - vampires drink blood. They do not "eat people". Werewolves eat people. This is a post-Buffy framework that I refuse to accept.

posted by Frowner to Media & Arts (41 answers total)

Lost Souls - Billy Martin (formerly known as Poppy Z Brite) - queer inflected Southern horror, staple of my adolesence

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

My Soul to Keep - Tananarive Due

Anno Dracula - Kim Newman

I regret not keeping all the tattered large trade paperbacks of all the classic vampire stories I used to have as a teen. My fave? This one.
posted by Kitteh at 7:44 AM on November 22, 2024 [4 favorites]

You might enjoy Katherine Addison's "The Angel of the Crows" which features Sherlock Holmsian vampire angels (she also wrote the amazing The Goblin Emperor)

Also Robin McKinley's Sunshine although that might be a bit to romantic for you? It's a good book all the same.
posted by Zumbador at 7:47 AM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a hard sci-fi novel about a spaceship crew led by a vampire who are investigating a possible alien intelligence. It has a number of surpring takes on vampires, 'personality disorders', and the nature and effectiveness of consciousness as an evolved survival trait. I highly recommend it.
posted by ananci at 8:10 AM on November 22, 2024 [5 favorites]

I would recommend checking out a series by Brian Lumley, the first book of which is Necroscope. Link to Goodreads review.

I see that it is included in the "horror" genre, but I don't recall it being too gory. It has been many years since I read it though, so I can't be sure.

I really enjoyed the series (at least the first 7 books) when I read it!
posted by bruinfan at 8:12 AM on November 22, 2024

Shambleau, one of the Northwest Smith tales of Leigh Brackett. (Good grief! Imagine a writing career that stretches from The Big Sleep to The Empire Strikes Back!) The titular Shambleau is an entity that's... not safe to be around.
posted by SPrintF at 8:14 AM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

You might like The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King. It's a novella set in the Dark Tower series, but can be read as a separate story. It's been a while since I read it, but I don't remember it being super gory. Warning for some horror elements using insects, though.
posted by fight or flight at 8:21 AM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

I really liked Fevre Dream by George RR Martin - vampires on a Mississippi riverboat.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:26 AM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Also Robin McKinley's Sunshine
Yeah, PussKillian recommended this one to me and I enjoyed it. It is romantic but not cheesy, if that helps.
posted by soelo at 8:28 AM on November 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

A recent novel I enjoyed is Blood Like Mine by Irish author Stuart Neville. A life-on-the-run thriller set mainly in the Southwest.
posted by leaper at 8:41 AM on November 22, 2024

Vivian Shaw's Greta Helsing novels, starting with Strange Practice, are modern but a love letter to that era of gothic novels. I haven't seen that mood captured so well since The Historian.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 8:51 AM on November 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

Lavie Tidhar's Judge Dee books. Presumably you already get the multiway pastiche involved. It's basically the opposite of gorey... unless you read between the lines.

A lot of the old White Wolf World of Darkness 1.0 stuff, including the fiction that's in the sourcebook. It varies in quality, and there's a small amount of stuff that's real questionable on the "not fit for human consumption" front, but the entire line put out like a solid decade of variously flavored urban fantasy. Not the most convenient way to get fiction, granted, and might not work for you if you're not a big fan of shared universe worldbuilding, but if you are, there's a ton and it's great. The Book of Nod, specifically, if you can find a second hand copy, has some aspects I imagine you would enjoy.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:16 AM on November 22, 2024

My favourite, "The Lady of the House of Love" by Angela Carter.
posted by sohalt at 9:38 AM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly is excellent and should fulfill your criteria.
posted by merriment at 9:45 AM on November 22, 2024 [5 favorites]

I’d like to recommend a collection of short stories I read when I was in high school. Only very recently I took some time to track the title down. It’s “The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories: Two Centuries of Great Stories with a Bite”. I don’t remember much except that I read all of the stories and enjoyed them. Looking at Amazon I can see that the stories are from 1816 to 1984. It was published in 1988.
posted by Locochona at 10:48 AM on November 22, 2024

I finally read ‘Salem’s Lot earlier this year, and it’s in my top three King books now. Really great, and fits your criteria pretty well.
posted by potent_cyprus at 11:36 AM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

I feel like the Barbara Hamblys and Robin McKinley's Sunshine are pretty good (and thanks, soelo!) I remember the Kim Newman books being either too gory or too bleak for me and I never kept going with them.
posted by PussKillian at 11:52 AM on November 22, 2024

The Necroscope series includes gobs of sexual assault and body horror. Lumley's vampires are monsters, regardless of how they start out. I don't think that they have huge amounts of gore, but yeah, there's some squick there.
Tanya Huff has a couple of (related) vampire series. The first is the Blood books where a detective teams up with a vampire to solve mysteries. There's a second Smoke series where the vampire from the Blood books and his human companion move to a different city. (I've only read one of these books, but I like her other stuff.)
There's also Del Toro's The Strain trilogy. The first book's really good, but it goes downhill quickly.
Chelsey Quinn Yarboro's Saint Germain books are about a vampire. I've only read a couple long ago, but they were OK? Apparently, there's 27 books in the series.
posted by Spike Glee at 12:15 PM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

I'm sure you'll have read Fledgling, but otherwise that.

Lucius Shepard, The Golden, "vampire Gormenghast" might be the elevator pitch. Caveat that I vaguely recall it had more misogynistic viewpoints and lurid sex, though not in "sexy vampire" style, than you may be going for here?
posted by away for regrooving at 12:37 PM on November 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

Came in to suggest Tanya Huff, who is reliably good. I will also second Salem's Lot, which completely terrified me as a preteen to a degree where I'm still scared when I think about it. Early King, before he got so overwhelmingly wordy. And chiming in to agree that Sunshine is a wonderful book.

Also, okay, it is sort of precisely what you do not want BUT! Gail Carriger. The Parasol Protectorate books and their sequels, the Custard Protocol books, are pastiche regencies and the vampires are only very rarely the love interest. Or actually never? I am trying to remember. I have read all of these more than once - they're funny, light and well written and I like her take on vampires (she's not really a fan.)
posted by mygothlaundry at 12:51 PM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

IIRC, the vampires in the Parasol Protectorate books either live in a hive, with a female queen, are are confirmed bachelors. I don't remember a whole lot about them. I think that the werewolves were a lot more prevalent.
If we're including side characters, the Kim Harrison's Hollows series is about a witch, but her business partner/roommate Ivy is a vampire. Also, the MC dates a vampire for a couple of books. (He takes her to an exclusive Vampire club, where they're happily line dancing to country music.)
The Kitty Norville books are all werewolf, all the time, but there are recurring vampire allies and enemies.
posted by Spike Glee at 1:17 PM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

Karen Joy Fowler's 2011 short story "Younger Women"

Incidentally, if you're down for some grimy experimental prose poetry sort of fiction, experimental enough that you don't know for sure if the characters are vampires or what, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps probably deserves cult status. A Biblioklept review has a brief excerpt.
posted by Wobbuffet at 1:22 PM on November 22, 2024

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers might satisfy your pastiche criterion
posted by pullayup at 1:52 PM on November 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

Robert Aickman's story "Pages From a Young Girl's Journal" in his collection Cold Hand in Mine.
posted by misteraitch at 2:12 PM on November 22, 2024

My two favorite YA vampire novels are Annette Curtis Klause's "The Silver Kiss" and Vivian Vande Velde's "Companions of the Night". It's been decades since I read "The Silver Kiss" in particular, so it may be too much of a romance--I remember it being about grief and death far more than any romantic plot.
posted by epj at 2:12 PM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

epj ARE YOU ME?!?! I have both of those sitting right next to each other on my childhood nostalgia bookshelf. I recall that both are lovely, although I also haven't re-read them in decades.
posted by merriment at 2:32 PM on November 22, 2024

A short story I adore - "A Kiss With Teeth"
posted by restless_nomad at 2:48 PM on November 22, 2024

I've read very little of any vampire fiction, but I've been very taken with Deborah Harkness's All Souls series (now up to five books), the main character of which is a reluctant witch who falls in love with a vampire -- in a world where (of course) witches and vampires typically don't get along. Harkness is a historian and her vampires are very long-lived, so there's a good deal of history mixed in with the vampirism.
posted by lhauser at 4:33 PM on November 22, 2024

https://thedreaming.moteofdust.com/1999/10/10/snow-glass-apples/

Snow, Glass, Apples
By Neil Gaiman
Short story, trigger warnings but it'd spoil the plot a bit.
posted by Elysum at 4:34 PM on November 22, 2024

The Silver Kiss is great and possibly an inspiration for Twilight (at least there are enough similarities that a lot of us give Twilight the side-eye on that account).

Annette Curtis Klause is a friend of a friend so I'm biased.
posted by edencosmic at 4:39 PM on November 22, 2024

Mur Lafferty's The Shambling Guide to New York City has vampires that don't only drink blood. They feed off humans in … other ways. Not gory at all, and very amusing. You might be offended by the non blood-drinking vampires, though
posted by scruss at 5:04 PM on November 22, 2024

Rainbow Rowell's trilogy of Carry On, Wayward Son, and Any Way The Wind Blows feature a vampire as one of the main characters, but they're not "Vampire Books", if that makes sense. The character is, incidentally, a vampire, but that's not what the whole story centers around.
posted by xedrik at 5:18 PM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Seconding Fevre Dream.

Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series is basically "vampire private eye noir" set in modern NYC. (There's wisecracking, but in the Sam Spade sense, not the Whedon sense.)

Christopher Buehlman is one of my new favorite writers - he's got some unique approaches to genre fiction. His two overtly vampiric novels are The Lesser Dead, set in 1978 NYC, and The Suicide Motor Club, set in the 60's across the US.

Chris Moore writes comedy novels, most of them horror or fantasy themed, he's got 3 about San Francisco vampires. (Bloodsucking Fiends, You Suck, and Bite Me.)
posted by soundguy99 at 5:51 PM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

I think this does not fit the spirit of your criteria, but I can't find it violating them explicitly. Justin Cronin's The Passage series is about an apocalyptic vampire-inducing virus.
posted by pjenks at 7:50 PM on November 22, 2024

> Blindsight by Peter Watts is a hard sci-fi novel about a spaceship crew led by a vampire

See also: this archival presentation on the discovery and resurrection of Homo sapiens whedonum from Fizerpharm Inc., entitled "Taming Yesterday's Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow"
posted by are-coral-made at 7:57 PM on November 22, 2024

What is your relationship with the Anne Rice Vampiric Universe?
posted by latkes at 10:26 PM on November 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

A charming and good-natured vampire is very near the center of Wen Spencer’s The Black Wolves of Boston, but he’s not the main protagonist. Spencer has an almost unique talent for populating her books with extremely likable, fully realized characters, and it’s available to read at Internet Archive.

You can also read several volumes of Fred Saberhagen's vampire series there. They meet your criteria well enough, but I get the feeling he may not be quite to your taste.
posted by jamjam at 10:28 PM on November 22, 2024

I recommended this the other day. A gentle and amusing series is The Vampire Knitting Club by Nancy Warren. An American moves to Oxford, England and ends up running a knitting shop inhabited by her grandmother who is known to be deceased but has been turned into a vampire and lives below the shop with a nest of sweet knitting vampires. They don't bite, they have a blood bank. Some have lived for centuries. They are very charming cozy mysteries.

One of my most favorite vampire series is the Midnight, Texas trilogy by Charlaine Harris. They are very funny and not sexy like her True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse books.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 10:33 PM on November 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Oh, Harry Connolly's A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark has substantial vampire activity, not a Vampire Tale per se but an urban fantasy if that suits. With the twist that the protagonist is a committed pacifist.

Not everything worked for me, but it's an interesting novel and worth a read.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:53 PM on November 22, 2024

Response by poster: Update: I have read The Golden, which was very good. If you ever thought, "gee, I wish that Gene Wolfe were a nihilist instead of a conservative Catholic and was just slightly less of a fine stylist", this might be the book for you.

I've also read Those Who Hunt The Night and am part way through the sequel. These are great for taking your mind off your troubles, provided that you can deal with possibly the most "I'm not like the other girls" heroine ever to hero. She's thin, very thin, and often forgets to eat, but she's exquisitely sylphlike rather than skinny. Other women are tarty sluts or else ugly servants. I'm sure that if Hambly had thought of it in time, she'd remark that Lydia's skin glowed like she'd swallowed the moon. Also, Lydia is much, much smarter than other women, especially working- and middle-class women, who are uniformly dumb and annoying, but Lydia feels duty bound to protect them anyway, that is when she's not reflecting on the experiments that she'd like to run on the workhouse residents. Lydia has lots of servants, but they're always saying extremely dumb things and trying to make her eat more than half a croissant.

This update was prompted, in fact, by an awkward bit of dialogue inserted in the second books so that we know that while Lydia is a doctor, she is kind of grossed out by "women's medicine", and unlike those other lesser poor women doctors she doesn't deal with "the plumbing". There is no reason for this dialogue - no one has asked her to whip out a speculum or anything - but we need to be assured that perfect sylphlike Lydia doesn't do anything as disgusting as, like, touch women's bodies.

It would be interesting to run with this characterization on purpose, like have Lydia and James Asher both be written as intensely annoying and really kind of terrible people, but I have the awful feeling that we're supposed to think that they're cool, especially Lydia.

The vampires are very interesting, though, would recommend on those grounds. I recognize that I am whining about these books while continuing to read them, and that's because I am trapped in this situation of basically really enjoying the vampires-across-Europe thing while being intensely annoyed by Lydia.

I do like that the vampires kind of stay evil and are, so far, not actually sexy in any way. We're constantly faced with how even the most sympathetic vampire of them all actually kills people pretty much daily, and Hambly sets it up so that there isn't any vampire-lite, "just drink a little blood, don't kill people" option.

I have A Delicate Dependency on order and am looking into some of the other books.

If you are looking for a vampire book, I forgot to mention that I have read those Kim Newman books. The first two are really too scary and grisly (but engaging!) but if you want a really good read with IMO an excellent female character, you might try Dracula Cha-cha-cha/The Judgement of Tears, which focuses on a truly great vampire character, journalist radical and all around awkward person Kate Reed. I personally would read basically infinite books about Kate Reed and her adventures.

Anyway, this was a great thread and has definitely given me a lot to read to take my mind off my troubles.
posted by Frowner at 4:44 PM on November 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

Ah, shit! I should probably know better than to recommend books I last read in the '90s. Glad you're enjoying the vampires, at least!
posted by merriment at 8:56 AM on November 30, 2024

Pre-dating Carmilla by about a quarter-century is Varney the Vampire, which lay down some of the basic vamp tropes that are observed even today. It's a penny dreadful, so, not Great Literature. But worth dipping into, I think.
posted by the sobsister at 1:36 PM on November 30, 2024