I always figured if a vampire existed then they’d probably be more like a boa constrictor; feeding wouldn’t be something they’d have to do everyday. One good feeding could hold them for weeks or maybe months and meanwhile they’d eat and drink like humans. Also IIRC in some of the older tales they could walk in daylight, but they had no powers and they looked more dead (since they didn’t start out in literature as sexy beasts but more like zombies). Are there any that are more like this?
Anne Rice’s are immortals who can’t reproduce, have sex, eat or drink or walk in daylight.
Charlaine Harris’s certainly can have sex but still can’t eat or drink or reproduce or walk in daylight.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s vamps are roughly on par with Charlaine Harris’s it seems: sex, live for centuries, but no food or daylight.
I honestly don’t know enough about TWILIGHT other than they can walk in daylight but sparkle or something like it.
Pretty much nobody writes vampires that are scared of crosses or don’t reflect in mirrors anymore.
Are there any vampires that can walk in daylight, biologically reproduce (other than through making another person a vampire), or eat food/drink water/wine/etc.? Or aren’t so much immortal as just "can live to be a lot older than most humans [i.e. 200 instead of 2,000]?
Spike also likes Chili’s Blooming Onion or something similar. Other than that I don’t remember an explicit mention of vampires eating food in Buffy.
Twilight vamps have much more in common with superheroes than any vampire lore; they have super-strength, super-speed, they are nigh-invulnerable (in the series, only werewolves and other vampires are shown to be able to harm them; wooden stakes et al. are useless against them), and most of them possess some additional super-power (telepathy, illusion-casting, sensory-depravation, manipulating probabilities, etc.). They are also more beautiful than humans.
Actually, the original Dracula strikes me as one of the more human vampires.
ETA Spoilers for Breaking Dawn:
Twilight vamps can sexually reproduce with humans, creating vamp/human hybrids who can both eat food and drink blood, who age for a time before they stop, etc.
My short story, “Curse of the Undead” (in Vampires edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg and reprinted in Read Magazine) would fit.
In it, vampires can do everything you talk about. The excpetion is that *are *immortal – nothing can kill them, not even a stake through the heart (“Hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but it won’t kill you”). They eat regular food, though with a special hunger for red meat. Sunlight doesn’t kill them. I don’t specifically address sex (it’s a YA story), but the implication is that it’s possible. Vampirism is a disease, but you live pretty normally.
I’ve been trying to remember if Timmy Valentine from Vampire Junction might fit the criteria.
The vampires of Peter Watt’s Blindsight are a near-human species, and not supernatural in any way. They feed on humans ( or did, in ancient times ) to get a substance that their own body doesn’t make ( like humans and vitamins ). They hibernate in order to conserve their slow breeding food source, therefore the “vampires rising from the dead” myth. And they have a quirk in their visual cortex that causes epileptic fits if they see two lines crossing at right angles; something almost never seen in nature so evolution never selected against it. Mentally they are actually less human than most vampires though; their mind is less unified than ours, and they have something called omnisavantism; savant style abilities that apply to all their mental functions, not just one. They are less conscious but more intelligent than humans.
Even though it’s an offshoot of Buffy, the vampires in Angel are pretty human. Sex, yes, reproduction, yes, though only once, eating food, yup - but most importantly they look very human most of the time and are mentally exactly like humans with an addiction (to blood). Harmony’s only mental vampire characteristic is that her bloodlust is strong enough to let her kill people - otherwise her personality is unchanged from when she was a human.
Vampire reproduction:
[ul]
[li] Vampires can on very rare occasions procreate with humans in the Anita Blake series by Laurel Hamilton. The older the vampire, the harder this is to achieve.[/li][li] Vampires in The Hollows series by Kim Harris are born to vampire parents. Their offspring (called living vampires to differentiate them from the undead) can be out and about in the day time etc, and don’t become undead until their physical deaths. [/li][li] Vampires have children just like any other species in Dragonfly by Frederic Durbin. They’re blood-thirsty little cusses.[/li][li] Vampires are also born to other vampires and age until adulthood in the Cal Leandros series by Rob Thurman. [/li][/ul]
Like RealityChuck, I’ve created ‘vampires’ – not for a short story, but for an ongoing webseries beginning in 1997. They meet the criteria of the OP and are largely human with almost no supernatural elements aside from the whole drinking blood thing. They reproduce normally, they can feed once every couple of months, they eat food (though don’t derive their chief nutrients from it), and while sensitive to light they don’t burn up or anything. In fact the conceit is that they simply have a disorder that requires the ingestion of blood for nourishment. Symptoms include photosensitivity and a certain hardiness, though not immortality. The society of people with this rare disorder developed a cult, which has lasted for centuries. Lots of pseudo-religious stuff that really revolves around money and power – kind of a Scientology dealie.
Basically I explained all the so-called supernatural elements in a biological way, and even the myths surrounding vampires were explained as having developed due to locals who misunderstood the disease and were (justifiably) afraid of those who had to steal blood to survive. Similar to how epileptics were considered possessed by devils.
Even the cross thing was explained because those many centuries ago who evinced the symptoms of the disease were persecuted during the Spanish Inquisition, and thus churchly relics (particularly Catholic ones) were considered symbols of that persecution and suffering they endured. This anathema developed into the myth that crosses are literally deadly or will ward off vampires.
It was a lot of fun (and clever if I do say so myself) and though the plotline doesn’t really figure in the series anymore, there are still characters on the canvas who have the syndrome – dormant though it is thanks to a serum developed with a certain organic compound called Allicin.
That’s why Blade could walk in the daylight. But vamps could reproduce too, remember the infighting between “purebloods” and “turned” vamps in the first movie?
In Chelsey Quinn Yarbro’s Saint Germain books vampires cannot reproduce or eat but can walk in daylight, although IIRC it does tire them somewhat. This is alleviated by wearing shoes lined with one’s native earth.
Rob Thurman’s vampires (Niko/Caliban Leandros series) cannot walk around during the day but otherwise just appear to be a different species…they can reproduce and have vampire children but cannot reproduce with humans (though they can have sex). However, vampires are not central to her novels (Rob is a she). Her vampires also are not blood obsessed…much like humans they need food but it isn’t all that they are about. If a human is starving he will go after any food and so will a vampire…but a hungry vamp is no less likely to lose control than a hungry human.
Karin Maaka in Chibi Vampire (the manga) or Karin (the anime) is very close to being a normal human being: she is a regular high school student, is able to walk in the sunlight, likes eating garlic, has no problem with crosses, and has a non-vampire boyfriend (though she tries to deny that bit). However, she’s an odd vampire compared with her parents, her older brother, and her younger sister, who are a bit closer to normal vampire material – they don’t like going out in the daytime, and they suck blood when they bite humans (though in this universe that’s usually good for the human).
Karin’s embarrassing secret is that instead of drawing blood from humans she produces excess blood, which she needs to inject into humans with her bite, or else it comes out in a spectacular nose bleed. And Karin really really needs to bite her boyfriend Kenta Usui, and he really needs to be bitten by her (though he doesn’t know that), but she is too embarrassed to do it (though she has bitten Kenta’s mother (!) and the vampire hunter who comes to their school and falls in love with Karin).
It’s a delightful subversion of the vampire myth, and well worth seeing.
They were somewhat inconsistent - Spike had all sorts of food fetishes including putting wheatie bits in his blood to make the blood more palatable, but he’s always been somewhat more… sentimental than other vampires. Angel drinks coffee and apparently likes donuts, but when he was briefly turned human he gorges on various foods, saying that as a vampire he wasn’t really able to enjoy things like ice cream. I’d say other than the rare ensouled vampire, and one or two who retained more of their human quirks than the average vamp, the vamps on Buffy were some of the least human, especially given that they explicitly have lost their soul, their ‘game face’, and the various older vamps and more grusome vamp related species.
Twilight probably has the most human - they are basically superheroes with sparkly skin who can only eat blood. They can have sex, even reproduce, and aren’t killed by sunlight.
Those from the recent Moonlight series and to a lesser extent Becoming Human probably run a close second - they are weakened by sunlight but can stand it for a little while. In the former vamps seem to still like sex, and can even revert to human temporarily with a rare herb.
