Please ID this vampire series...

Cafe Society
1

Back in the mid-90s, I came across one novel in a series, the title and author of which I absolutely cannot remember right now.

It was a vampire novel series, but the vampires were actually parasitic creatures that took over human bodies. They weren’t humanoid in their native form. They MAY have actually been ETs, but I don’t remember that for sure.

The books themselves centered on a government agent who was hunting these vampires down, or maybe trying to get to the center of a conspiracy between these vampire parasites and the government officials.

My brain keeps trying to say the author was Robert Ludlum, but that’s got to be wrong, and I think I remember noting my confusion even back then.

Anyone got anything here? Thanks!

2

You don’t mean “The Puppetmasters” by Robert Heinlein, do you? It’s got non-humanoid parasitic creatures that control humans, a government agent trying to stop them, and an author named “Robert” (and it was republished in 1990).

3

No, these were very much explicitly vampiric. The name for them was even some variation on “vampire”, like “vampyri” or something.

4

The Necroscope series. The “wampyri” were a fusion of a human host and an ectoplasmic parasite.

5

That’s it! Brian Lumley was the author. I still don’t remember how I even came across it. But yeah, the wamphyri are what I was looking for.

Thank you!