This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Halloween Freebie”.
I’ve joined in with the Halloween Freebie topic every year for the last few years and have already posted lists of books with Halloween related words in the title, horror novels I read before blogging, books with monstrous animals and creatures, and books about witches. This year, I’ve chosen books with vampires in them. I decided to only include books I’ve actually reviewed on my blog – as you can see, I struggled to find ten, but managed it in the end!
1. Dracula by Bram Stoker – The obvious first choice for any list of vampire books! I enjoyed this one, but as with any classic story that has become such a big part of popular culture, it’s difficult to fully appreciate it the way readers at the time would have done.
2. The Vampyre by John Polidori – One of the earliest vampire stories and an influence on many that would follow. I read this along with Byron’s unfinished Fragment of a Novel and both are fascinating to read from the perspective of understanding the origins of vampire fiction.
3. White Teeth, Red Blood: Selected Vampiric Verses – A poetry anthology with a vampire theme. It includes classic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling and Emily Dickinson as well as some contemporary ones.
4. The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton – The story of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman accused of murdering hundreds of peasant girls (and sometimes considered to be an inspiration for Dracula).
5. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu – Le Fanu’s classic novella about a lesbian vampire is thought to have influenced Dracula, which was published more than twenty years later, but it’s also an entertaining story in its own right.
6. Vlad: The Last Confession by C.C. Humphreys – This is not technically a vampire novel, but historical fiction about Vlad Dracula (also known as Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler), the real life Prince of Wallachia whose name inspired Bram Stoker’s character.
7. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness – Matthew Clairmont is one of several vampires who arrives at Oxford University in search of a magical manuscript discovered by Diana Bishop, a witch. Matthew and Diana’s story continues in Shadow of Night, but I never read the other books in the series.
8. He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr – There’s no actual vampire in this book, but it deals with a murder in which the prime suspect is a woman believed to be a vampire!
9. A Remedy for Fate by MA Kuzniar – Although he’s just a minor character, Wojslav the vampire runs an antique shop in the Magic Quarter, a magical land hidden beneath the streets of 18th century Prague.
10. The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter – This is a short story which appears in The Bloody Chamber and features a beautiful vampire countess who lives in an abandoned chateau in Transylvania.
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And that’s my Top Ten for this week. These books don’t all contain vampires, but they do at least have vampiric connections! I wanted to include Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, but I read that one just before I started blogging. I’m also currently reading The Last Handmaid by Clare Whitfield, another novel about Countess Erzsébet Báthory.
Have you read any of these or any other books with vampires in them?
