When Colette returns to her hometown after a decade away, she knows her life will never be the same. With the war between the two families finally cooling, Colette returns to Mayfield determined to improve relations in the divided city the only way she knows how. Opening up a business that serves both humans and vampires isn’t going to win her any friends, but she didn’t expect enemies to pop up so quickly. Danger lurks in the shadows as she does all she can to repair the broken city she left behind so many years ago. Now with her head held high and her father’s stubborn nature in her veins, Colette collides with the one vampire whom she knows could shatter her plans—and her heart. "The Vampire’s City" is filled with political intrigue and scandalous secrets, written by USA Today bestselling fantasy romance author, Mary E. Twomey.

What is real about city life? Real Cities shows why it is necessary to take seriously the more imaginary, fantastic and emotional aspects of city life. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel, Pile explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of the city. Such experiences are, he argues, best described as phantasmagorias. The phantasmagorias of city life, though commonplace, are far from self-evident and little understood. This book is a path-breaking exploration of urban phantasmagorias, grounded empirically in a series of unusual and exciting case studies. In this study, four substantial phantasmagorias are identified: dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts. The investigation of each phantasmagoria is developed using a wide variety of clear examples. Thus, voodoo in New York and New Orleans shows how ideas about magic are forged within cities. Meanwhile vampires reveal how specific fears about sex and death are expressed within, and circulate between, cities such as London and Singapore. Taken together, such examples build a unique picture of the diverse roles of the imaginary, fantastic and the emotional in modern city life. What is "real" about the city has radical consequences for how we think about improving city life, for all too often these are over-looked in utopian schemes for the city. Real Cities forcefully argues that an appreciation of urban phantasmagorias must be central to what is considered real about city life.

The Ultimate Collection of Vampire Facts and Fiction From Vlad the Impaler to Barnabas Collins to Edward Cullen to Dracula and Bill Compton, renowned religion expert and fearless vampire authority J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D. takes the reader on a vast, alphabetic tour of the psychosexual, macabre world of the blood-sucking undead. Digging deep into the lore, myths, pop culture, and reported realities of vampires and vampire legends from across the globe, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead exposes everything about the bloodthirsty predator. Death and immortality, sexual prowess and surrender, intimacy and alienation, rebellion and temptation. The allure of the vampire is eternal, and The Vampire Book explores it all. The historical, literary, mythological, biographical, and popular aspects of one of the world's most mesmerizing paranormal subject. This vast reference is an alphabetical tour of the psychosexual, macabre world of the soul-sucking undead. In the first fully revised and updated edition in a decade, Dr. J. Gordon Melton (president of the American chapter of the Transylvania Society of Dracula) bites even deeper into vampire lore, myths, reported realities, and legends that come from all around the world. From Transylvania to plague-infested Europe to Nostradamus and from modern literature to movies and TV series, this exhaustive guide furnishes more than 500 essays to quench your thirst for facts, biographies, definitions, and more.

From its looming above-ground cemeteries to the ghosts believed to haunt its stately homes, New Orleans is a city deeply entwined with death, the undead, and the supernatural. The reasons behind New Orleans’s reputation as America’s most haunted city are numerous. Its location near the mouth of the Mississippi River grants it a liminal status between water and land, while its Old World architecture and lush, moss-covered oak trees lend it an eerie beauty. Complementing the city’s mysterious landscape, spiritual beliefs and practices from Native American, African, African American, Caribbean, and European cultures mingle in a unique ferment of the paranormal. An extremely high death rate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a long history of enslavement and oppression have also produced fertile soil for stories of the undead. Focusing on three manifestations of the supernatural in New Orleans—Voodoo, ghosts, and vampires—Robin Roberts argues that the paranormal gives voice to the voiceless, including victims of racism and oppression, thus encouraging the living not to repeat the injustices of the past.

An exhaustive work covering the full range of topics relating to vampires, including literature, film and television, and folklore. Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture is a comprehensive encyclopedia relating to all phases of vampirism—in literature, film, and television; in folklore; and in world culture. Although previous encyclopedias have attempted to chart this terrain, no prior work contains the depth of information, the breadth of scope, and the up-to-date coverage of this volume. With contributions from many leading critics of horror and supernatural literature and media, the encyclopedia offers entries on leading authors of vampire literature (Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer), on important individual literary works (Dracula and Interview with the Vampire), on celebrated vampire films (the many different adaptations of Dracula, the Twilight series, Love at First Bite), and on television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel). It also covers other significant topics pertaining to vampires, such as vampires in world folklore, humorous vampire films, and vampire lifestyle.

In the modern world vampires come in all forms: they can be perpetrators or victims, metaphors or monsters, scapegoats for sinfulness or mirrors of our own evil. What becomes obvious from the scope of the fifteen essays in this collection is that vampires have infiltrated just about every area of popular culture and consciousness. In fact, the way that vampires are depicted in all types of media is often a telling signifier of the fears and expectations of a culture or community and the way that it perceives itself; and others. The volume’s essays offer a fascinating insight into both vampires themselves and the cultures that envisage them.

Prominent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.