During the mid-1970s, the most popular vampire novels foreshadowed the concept of the vampire epic, with Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire becoming the first of the Vampire Chronicles. Beginning in 1978, we were given only a hint of the towering efforts and prodigious talents of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro when she introduced us to what would become the Saint-Germain series. Tales of Yarbro's impossibly “human” vampire have been in nonstop evolution for thirty years and there's no sign of Saint-Germain disappearing into that cold dark night.

Welcome to the Hotel Transylvania

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's first effort in the series, Hotel Transylvania, is set in the French court of King Louis XIV in the mid-seventeenth century, and features the enduring Count of Saint-Germain, who's been a vampire for hundreds of years and manages, unlike most vampires, to maintain a sense of superior humanity over bloodlust. In sharp counterpoint to Rice's vampires, or to those of virtually any other author, Yarbro's Saint-Germain is suave, sophisticated, and genuinely concerned about other human beings; in effect, he's a vampire with a soul. Both undead and immortal, he's acutely aware of the frailty of human life, and he does his best to respect the living while abhorring the evils that mankind brings upon itself.

To paraphrase Yarbro's personal perspective on the subject of the eternal vampire living in a world of mortals, her unusual approach to the vampire condition is to consider how a rational being would realistically react to the dilemma of being threatened with permanent alienation from mankind. Yarbro's sympathetic approach to the vampiric experience cast a new light on what was previously assumed to be an inherently evil transformation. Unlike Dracula, and in fact unlike most vampires in lore and literature, Saint-Germain “treasures the brevity of human life rather than holding it in contempt.” For millions of transfixed readers, the lack of gore and violence in Yarbro's work has hardly been a dull literary experience. In fact, it's instead proven to be life affirming and poetic. Yarbro's twenty-second book in the saga, A Dangerous Climate, was published in September of 2008.

The influences of Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro spawned a renewed and unwaning interest in all things dripping crimson. Here are just a few of the notable books and authors who followed in their preternatural steps:

The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980)

Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin (1982)

Vampire Junction by S. P. Somtow (1984)

Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly (1988)

The Golden by Lucius Shepard (1992)

Children of the Night by Dan Simmons (1992)

A Whole Lot of Salem

The prodigious and prolific talents of horror-fiction icon Stephen King were put to use in 1975 with his second published novel, Salem's Lot. King is said to have begun the novel after pondering what would happen if Dracula re-emerged in twentieth-century America. The result was a truly creepy story set in the sleepy town of Salem's Lot in rural Maine, and it involved a series of disturbing occurrences and missing children that coincides with the arrival of newcomer Kurt Barlow, who now inhabits an old house with a lurid past. Soon the entire community is overrun as townspeople are transformed into vampires one by one. The protagonists in the book are eventually forced to leave Salem's Lot to the vampiric infestation, although they do manage to destroy Barlow before taking flight. Salem's Lot has the unusual distinction of having been made into two television series; one in 1979, and the second in 2004. Although King originally called the namesake of the book “Jerusalem's Lot,” the publishers shortened the title to Salem's Lot because they felt the original title carried too many religious connotations.

Feeding The Hunger

Taking a fascinating and fresh approach to the vampire novel, Whitley Strieber created one of the most enduring images of the coldly calculating vampire in The Hunger, published in 1981. The last of her species of a bloodsucking alien race, vampire Miriam Blaylock has lived for thousands of years and is in the habit of taking human lovers and turning them into lifelong companions — but for only the length of their lives (see Chapter 15). Although Miriam has the power to turn humans into vampires, she lacks the capacity to give them everlasting life such as hers and manages to increase their lifespan by only a few centuries — a tragically short time frame from the perspective of a timeless being. After The Hunger, Strieber stepped away from the vampire genre and concentrated on speculative fiction and books concerning his own alleged contact with aliens. Twenty years after its publication, however, Strieber returned to the saga of Miriam Blaylock with The Last Vampire in 2001, and again in 2002 with Lilith's Dream: A Tale of the Vampire's Life.

The Historian

It's interesting to note that one of the best-selling books of 2005 was a vampire novel. In The Historian, first-time novelist Elizabeth Kostova brought Bram Stoker's Dracula into the modern era by excerpting significant chunks of Stoker's novel and working it into her own historical plotline. In the story, a teenage girl living in Amsterdam discovers in her father's library an ancient book that is blank save for a woodcut of a sinister dragon on one page with the word “Drakulya.” The discovery leads to a long search for Dracula, and once again Vlad Tepes comes into the picture — this time with truly spine-chilling results. He's not simply the inspiration for the vampire Dracula, but the still-living personification of the father of all bloodsuckers.