It can be considered that Bram Stoker is the father of the vampire genre. But the truth is that his transmutation of the already existing Count Dracula as the origin of his masterpiece distorts that authorship. In the end it can then be thought that it was his own Dracula who indirectly used Stoker to spread his myth with that point of idealization and gradual transformation that every legend incorporates into the collective imagination.
And of course, after Stoker (who in turn had also been carried away by legends about evil dead beings) they arrived many other writers who pulled from the repertoire of the long teeth to fill pages and pages and then celluloid tapes. Thus literature and cinema further raised the impact of a character who even today has his Freudian reading in our dreams. (Be careful with that neck that you want to nibble ...)
It must be recognized that among the misdeeds of Vlad Tepes (the aforementioned count) and the misty cover of the overflowing imagination of the Stoker writer ended up outlining a magnetic character. A point between romantic, dark and even Gothic due to the origins of deep Europe, the showiness of the blood that Dracula shed so profusely in his punishments, the profuse legends of those places about undead beings that returned at night ...
Everything conspires to focus the idea of remote bloodsucking vampires on the image of a cloaked Dracula and his palace. And so one of the most gloomy and feared characters of our civilization passed to posterity like no other. The posterior foothills have everything, an erotic reading of blood, the hedonistic, immortality, the already indicated nibbles, the accelerated blood that gushes out ...
Top 3 Recommended Vampire Books
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Inevitable. From this work flows any of the later interpretations or spurs of literary vampirism. From the impressions that Stoker himself collected from Count Dracula and his domains, he was in charge of building a complex framework about immortality, the burden of evil-dead beings, their characteristics and weaknesses, their terrifying part but also charged with a disconcerting magnetism ... All part of this first adaptation of a real character and surrounding myths.
Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer from London, has to close a deal with the mysterious Count Dracula. He travels to the Count's castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, to become the guest and prisoner of a man who is never reflected in mirrors, and never eats in his presence.
From here on, even Harker's love affair with young Mina Murray will suffer. The quintessential Gothic novel, which has remained an unalterable reference for more than a hundred years. Its practically epistolary nature gives it that point of absolute realism of the narration told in the first person. Perhaps the final dressing for the first readers, and even any reader today, to cross that threshold of confusion between what is true and what is imagined ...
Salem's Lot mystery
Stephen King There was no contempt for this novel about vampires that terrified a whole generation of kids, including myself. It is difficult to forget the image of that pale child scratching the glass of his brother's room, as if levitating from outside in the middle of the night. In the same way that even today I can evoke the chills of reading any other scene. A terrifying work of the literary takeoff of a Stephen King that later he would extend his mastery to many other narrative fields.
Salem's Lot is a quiet town where nothing ever happens. Or maybe these are just appearances, because the truth is that various mysterious events are happening, even chilling ... Twenty years ago, for a childish bet, Ben Mears entered the Marsten house. And what he saw then still runs through his nightmares. Now, as a devoted writer, he returns to Salem's Lot to exorcise his ghosts.
Salem's Lot is a sleepy, quiet town where nothing ever happens… except the ancient tragedy of the Marsten home. And the dead dog hanging from the graveyard fence. And the mysterious man who took up residence in the Marsten house. And the children that disappear, the animals that bleed to death ... And the frightening presence of Elloswhoever they are Ellos.
Dracula, the origin
Not long ago JD Barker, a young writer who is gaining considerable space in horror literature and even in the noir genre, fearlessly surrendered to the commission of making the prequel to Dracula. Everything today must have its prequel. Perhaps it is a matter of looking for the commercial squeeze to the last drop. I am not entirely against it but it is true that the suspicions of the lovers of the character or series of turn are raised ...
Every prequel has that inherent risk of easy, sometimes ruthless criticism. Revisiting a classic and daring to propose fundamentals that every passionate about a saga or a character has already been in charge of building in his mind, has that slippery terrain warning.
But this time this aspect could be avoided. In fact, the recovery of annotations by the author endowed with that incontestable verisimilitude of the origin, of the source (even more so, the heir Dacre Stoker participating in the plot).
Because Bram Stoker has his own legend and his writings that, under the umbrella of the nostalgic and sinister nineteenth-century touch of his existence, addresses a possible dark relationship with his nanny Ellen Crone and a hinted vampirization of the boy who was and who could cure him of some type of anemia that ineffably led him to death.
And in that mix between reality and fiction that always dazzles lovers of this genre and those who are passionate about any historical character, Barker was in charge of setting the story of the days when Bram Stoker verified in his own flesh the power of life after death.
Interview with the Vampire
Published in the 70s, it has been one of the most valued and always evoked works on this subject. With undeniable sexual connotations, even homosexual ones, he reaffirmed that link between the vampire world and erotic dreams that are always linked to the idea of blood, bites ...
In this novel, Anne Rice narrates the conversion of a young man from New Orleans into an eternal inhabitant of the night. The protagonist, carried away by the feeling of guilt caused by the death of his younger brother, yearns to transform himself into a cursed being.
However, from the beginning of his supernatural life, he feels invaded by the most human feelings, such as the love that ties him to one of his victims, a passion not exempt, of sexual and psychological dependence.
With Interview with the Vampire, Rice began her Vampire Chronicles series and achieved great success after her successful film adaptation. How can we forget those scenes in which Antonio Banderas and Tom Cruise indulged in lust with those indolent gestures of the one known to be cradled by immortality ...
Then there are many other books. And even a youthful side of immense success and replicated ad nauseam by Stephenie Meyer and his twilight saga. But that is something else and certainly, being suggestive for young readers, it slightly detracts from the legend of Dracula and the myth of the vampires ...
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