vampires

The DVD says Dracula, Season 1. There is no season two. The series ran on NBC in the 2013-2014 season and didn't get renewed. Which is a shame because although it's hilariously campy (in a brooding, gothic way) and takes extreme liberties with the source material, it's also a tremendous amount of fun for fans of melodrama, stylish visuals, steamy sex scenes, and Grand Guignol violence.

The craziness starts with the premise: Transylvanian Count Dracula is in London posing as an American inventor/entrepreneur, Alexander Grayson (and played by Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers--like I said

This is a very interesting, hard-to-pin-down film. It's a Persian-language, American-produced and filmed, black-and-white vampire flick. The title itself, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, invokes our culturally-ingrained sense of danger at the concept of a woman being alone on the streets after dark. In this instance, since she's a vampire, it's the nameless girl of the title who is the danger lurking in the shadows. Again defying expectations, far from being a source of evil, it seems as though the girl is the ethical force in her chaotic and amoral surroundings. She warns a young boy to

Husband and wife co-authors, Clay and Susan Griffith have put a new twist to an old tale in this first book of their Vampire Empire trilogy. 

In 1870, vampire clans rose from underground and the fringes of society to unite and overcome all of North America and Europe, causing the surviving humans to flee south. The Greyfriar begins in the year 2020 when two of the largest human societies are about to be united by marriage, so they can start a war to retake the north. Princess Adele, heir to the Equatorian Empire (think of the old British Colonies), is doing one last diplomatic foray before doing her duty and marrying Senator Clark...

Vampires in Saint Louis? Yes, and they need help. Guilty Pleasures is the first of the Laurell K. Hamilton’s wildly popular Vampire Hunter stories. Anita Blake is a necromancer, with an affinity for the dead in all their guises, but that doesn’t mean she wants to work for them. When the Master Vampire of Saint Louis sends sexy Jean Paul to procure Anita’s help her main response is, “I don’t date vampires. I kill them.”

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Anita Blake. In this narrative told entirely from her point of view, Anita comes across as a sharp, strong woman with a biting sense of humor and a

I’ve long enjoyed reading Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series. So long that I barely remembered what happened in the first book, Dead Until Dark. Instead of rereading it, I decided to listen to the audio. I’m glad I did.

The narrator, Johanna Parker, captures the essence of Sookie in all her different moods – perky, angry, scared, nervous, ecstatic, and so on. It was a treat to hear Sookie come alive.

I’m always in awe of how one person can sound like many different people. Ms. Parker does a creditable job of making all the different characters have a different voice – tone, pitch

When I was in elementary school, I read many, many books on monsters and the paranormal. Books about ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, mummies, werewolves...and vampires. Outside of books, there wasn't a lot to see with vampires at the time. You might catch classic Universal monster movies or the later, bloodier Hammer horror movies on late night TV (assuming you could convince your parents to let you stay up that late). Scooby-Doo and other Saturday morning cartoons would have vampires (usually just cranky old men in costumes), there were some horror comics that had vampires in

A stealth-action with RPG elements.  About vampires.  This game should be amazing.

It isn't.  Oh, how it isn't.

Dark is what happens when a reject from the Metal Gear Solid team gets hopped up on Red Bull and Anne Rice.  You begin as the unfortunately named Eric Bane, recent vampire attack victim and newly made vampire with a memory problem.  Happily, you're in a nightclub run by vampires looking out for each other, and they get you started with a training course—There's some homeless guys in the alley, go eat them!—and a warning that if you don't drink your creator's blood you'll turn into

After years of living in the shadows, being glorified as sparkly lovers and dangerous enemies and on TV, vampires have revealed themselves to humans. After a nasty outbreak of vampirism, thanks to a misplaced act of mercy, the world cannot ignore the lore. Infected cities are walled off from the public, called Coldtowns, these places are exquisite prisons for vampires. Humans, enthralled with the beauty and horror of vampires flock to the Coldtowns to offer their sweet red blood for the chance of being turned.

An entire industry has sprung up around the Coldtowns. The elaborate masquerades of

When seventeen-year-old Tana wakes up hungover from a wild party at a remote farmhouse, surrounded by dead classmates, she thinks things can't get any worse...until she discovers a mysterious vampire named Gavriel chained up in the same room as her bitten ex-boyfriend Aiden, who is about to turn into a full-fledged bloodsucker at any moment.  Acting on impulse, she saves Gavriel and Aiden from the horde of vampires responsible for the massacre, and prepares to drive them to Coldtown--the quarantine zone where vampires mingle with humans in decadent parties that last for years, all broadcast on

Kresley Cole does it again with this amazing, riveting tale of Lothaire—an ancient vampire bent on ruling all of the Horde (evil vampires, btw)! But wait... his efforts thwarted by puny Elizabeth Pierce, a mere mortal. This book does not follow the same-old, same-old recipe I commonly find in paranormal romance novels. It's got sass, it's got vavoom, and I give it 5 fangs out of 5! In fact, I think I'm going to read it again.... and again...
 

Robert is the last man in New York City after a massive epidemic that turned everyone into vampires. By day he sharpens stakes, makes runs to the abandoned grocery stores for dry goods, and maintains his generator and the protections around his house. By night they come. Crowding around the doors and windows they call to him, begging him to come outside. The loneliness is enough to drive a man insane, but to have to listen to them every night is almost too much for Robert. But after binge drinking for three days, Robert sobers up and realizes that he needs to either kill himself or move on, he

The television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which appeared for seven seasons, is a mix of California sunshine and old B movies.  Buffy manages to bypass the stereotypical gothic atmosphere with a modern, realistic setting and plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor.  Each episode starts with the beginning of the story and explodes into music by the band Nerf Herders, accompanied by a slide show of pictures from current seasons. Sara Michelle Gellar as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” leads the Scooby Gang, as they refer to themselves, through a nonstop combination of karate, street fighting, and

Forget Princess Mia of Genovia. Forget Harry Potter. The Radleys are about to be outed. And by their own daughter no less.

Devotees of The Abstainer’s Handbook, Peter and Helen are living a lie in order to raise their children as “normal people”. Their suffering is exacerbated by each of their mid-life crises. Pale and gangly Rowan is a bullied outcast in their small English town. And Clara’s recent conversion to veganism only magnifies her anemia.

But everything changes when Clara accidentally discovers a dark family secret. One night at a party she savagely kills a classmate in a way that

I am going to write about something near and dear to my heart, Buffy. I don't know about you but I tend to move from one obsession to another and for several years I turned my attention to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon in general. If, goodness forbid, you are unfamiliar with Buffy allow me to enlighten you: Regular California teenager Buffy Summers discovers she is the chosen one, destined to bring about the end of vampires and evil in general. Now obviously, there is a lot going on outside that short summary but you get the idea, lots of big bad guys, fighting, conflict, love, etc

Having read Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and enjoyed it tremendously, I was looking forward to his next book. When I first started Abraham Lincoln I found it a little off-putting because Pride had followed Austin’s book and Abraham Lincoln was not based on a book about Abraham Lincoln. As I moved through the book, I found myself drawn into Abe’s life. The author claims to have found Lincoln’s diaries detailing his fight against vampires. It seems Lincoln’s mother died after being bitten by a vampire and he spent his life fighting and killing vampires. He claims that the

Jessica is looking forward to her senior year of high school in small town Pa. This is supposed to be the best year of her life, hang out with friends, get into a good college, and possibly get her first kiss. But everything goes horribly wrong on the first day of school when she is surprised by a creepy guy hanging out at the bus stop, crazy hippie parents won't give her a car. She swears she can hear him whisper her name before she gets on the bus, but it isn't the name Jessica, it is Antastasia, the name she was given as a baby by her birth parents.

Jessica's day gets worse when the same