Recommend Vampire Books please

I was at the book store last night and trying to remember a vampire book recommended by a doper ( anno something?) and came up dry.

I was recommended Anne Bishop series, but didn’t buy them as the store was closing and I like to read the first chapter or so before I make any commitment. Any thoughts on them?

Any kind, but I am partial to something with a nice line of humor, too.

Anno Dracula?

I read it many years ago, so I remember very little about it, but I liked it at the time.

Sweet Silver Blues by Glen Cook.

It’s about vampires, and has a different “take” on the whole Fearless Vampire Hunter thing.

Don’t know the Anno thing. However, I have personally enjoyed:

The Vampire Files Series by Patricia N. Elrod
A Dozen Black Roses by Nancy A. Collins
Dracula by Bram Stoker (of course)

Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore may not be exactly what you are looking for but it is about vampires and damn is it funny.

The Historian is supposed to be good. Somebody read it and let me know, please.

Charlaine Harris has a series out called Southern Vampire . It has five books now, all with “dead” in the title; the first is Dead until Dark. Funny and quirky. The protagonist lives in a small town in the South and reads minds.

Robin McKinley’s book Sunshine is another vampire book I really enjoyed.

Fred Saberhagen:

The Dracula Tapes
Thorn
An Old Friend of the Family

Vlad Tepes as protagonist. Very cool.

Salem’s Lot, of course. :slight_smile:

George R. R. Martin wrote a good one – Fevre Dream – vampires on a Mississippi riverboat in the 1800’s.

Vampire Junction by S. P. Somtow.
The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers (a truly different vampire novel, brilliantly integrated into historical fact).
Gil’s All-Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez is a fun read.

For anthologies, get Vampires by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg and Blood Muse by Esther Friesner and Greenberg. Buy lots of copies. Lots!!! I can use the cash. :wink:

They are not ‘good’ by literary standards, but I enjoyed some of the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton. Some sex (at least in later installments), some gore, some sarcastic humor.

I’ve been thinking about reading Sex and the Single Vampire, but am having second thoughts thinking it’s heavier on romance than sex and violence.

Of course, the best all-round Vampire writer (IMO, of course) is Anne Rice. Strangely, if you sort contemporary vampire novels by best sellers, most of the novels are serial installments by female writers. Rice’s novels are largely serials, with a few recurring characters; Hamilton writes about vampire hunger, Anita Blake; and the list continues with Davidson, Harrison, Harris, Macalister, etc.

Seconding Sunshine. Funny, chatty, well-written.

Absolutely - I strongly agree as to both. Outstanding in very different ways from each other, but both are well worth your time.

If you don’t mind dipping into a D&D world, Christie Golden’s Vampire of the Mists is very, very good. It’s a Ravenloft book, but IMHO it trancends the “licensed world” genre.

I’ve got to third Robin McKinley’s Sunshine and also recommend the two vampire books by Barbara Hambly, Those Who Hunt The Night and Traveling with the Dead.

Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula is excellent; it’s a variation on the original Dracula where Dracula was not killed by Van Helsing and company and takes over England. He creates hundreds of other vampires and they become the new ruling society with humans forming an underground resistance movement. One interesting feature is that Newman is a scholar of horror fiction and film and he brings in dozens of characters from other books and movies for cameo appearances in his book. Newman’s written two sequels and he’s working on a third.

Another interesting look at a vampire ruled society is Brian Stableford’s Empire of Fear. I’d also recommend Jonathan Nasaw’s World on Blood, which is a very good novel that’s unusual because it features non-supernatural vampires.

Which brings to mind Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.

I think AuntiePam and I must read the same books. Fevre Dream by George RR Martin is excellent. I would also add The Madness Season by C.S. Friedman. Imagine vampires plus an alien invasion. It’s awesome, really!

I agree on Sunshine and Nancy A Collins Sonja Blue series. Wonderful books, and I hope Robin writes a sequel to Sunshine.

Of late I’ve been dragged into the ‘Undead and…’ series by Mary Janice Davidson. It starts with Undead and Unwed. Betsy Taylor is having a really bad week, she gets fired and gets hit by a car only to wake up in the morgue wearing her step-mother’s cast offs and not a Prada shoe in sight. It’s a fun series, and I thought I would hate it but I’ve already got the 28th circled as the day to buy the third book in the series.

Susan Sizemore is another good one, she is a romance author but her Laws of the Blood series aren’t.

If you can get your hands on it I would also reccomend As One Dead by Don Bassingthwaite and Nancy Kilpatrick. It’s one of the novels put out by White Wolf from their Vampire game but you don’t have to know anything about the game to read it.

Anne Bishop? I never realized she did vampires. Unless that’s the Black Jewels series? I couldn’t get into that one.

I’ve also read a few of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St Germain series which follows the main character (St. Germain) through the centuries. I plan to pick up more and read them.

I have others I liked, but this is enough for now grins

I recommend the unrelated Fat White Vampire Blues by Andrew Fox. I expected a book about a 450 pound vampire to be a comedy. While there are plenty of laughs, there’s also a lot of tragedy.

I also recommend issue twenty of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children. Though they look like regular comic books from the outside, Beautiful Stories were prose stories with illustrations. This issue contains the tale “Arnold:Confessions Of A Blood Junkie” Arnold is obese, unglamorous, and just trying to deal with his undead existence.