The nightmare of the dead rising from their graves and sucking the blood of the living has haunted us since prehistory. Legends, literature and terrifying case histories trace the survival of vampires from antiquity to the gaslit streets of London. From age to age, the same terrifying myth has adapted itself to the beliefs of the time. Today it is kept alive through fiction and the cinema, which have distilled our worst fears and most secret desires. The world of the undead lives on.

This encyclopedic and exquisitely eerie guide is as elegant and menacing as the creature it describes. With nearly 200 photographs and illustrations, this entertaining and erudite collection of myth, folklore, literature and popular culture is seductively priced in its new paperback edition.

· Are any vampire myths based on fact? · Bloodsucking villain to guilt-ridden loner—what has inspired the redemption of the vampire in fiction and film? · What is Vampire Personality Disorder? What causes a physical addiction to another person’s blood? · Are there any boundaries in the polysexual world of vampires? · How could a vampire hide in today’s world of advanced forensic science? · What is the psychopathology of the vampire? · What happens in the brain of a vampire’s victim? Si...

This hauntingly beautiful book from the master of gothic imagery is the essential guide to the lore and landscapes of the vampire.

It's been over a century since the humans lost the war for Earth. Cities have been reclaimed by nature, and the planet is quiet and empty by day. At night, feral vampires-more beast than man-roam the lands, hungry for blood. The few thousand surviving humans live on a massive airship that circles the Earth, moving with the rotation of the planet so it's always in sunlight. Alexandria Goddard is a member of the elite Ground Mission Team, a group tasked with making dangerous runs to the planet's surface for the supplies needed to keep the ship airborne. But even as the team fights for their people's survival, dangerous forces are working against them. A growing movement aboard the airship believes it's time for humans to resettle the Earth, and they are willing to go to extreme measures to make their vision a reality. As the situation aboard the ship becomes more desperate, Alex and her team discover a terrifying secret about the vampires infesting the Earth. P.T. Hylton, author of Regulation 19 and the Zane Halloway series, and Jonathan Benecke, a bold new voice in science fiction, bring you a post-apocalyptic vision of a world where vampires rule, humanity is on the run, and safety is an illusion as fleeting as a shadow.

The spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author—the inspiration for the hit television series “A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth—the education of the vampire.”—Chicago Tribune Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write.

Vampires are arguably the most popular and most paradoxical of gothic monsters: life draining yet passionate, feared yet fascinating, dead yet immortal. Vampire content produces exquisitely suspenseful stories that, combined with motion picture filmmaking, reveal much about the cultures that enable vampire film production and the audiences they attract. This collection of essays is generously illustrated and ranges across sixteen cultures on five continents, including the films Let the Right One In, What We Do in the Shadows, Cronos, and We Are the Night, among many others. Distinctly different kinds of European vampires have originated in Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and Serbia. North American vampires are represented by films from Mexico, Canada, and the USA. Middle Eastern locations include Tangier, Morocco, and a fictional city in Iran. South Asia has produced Bollywood vampire films, and east Asian vampires are represented by films from Korea, China, and Japan. Some of the most recent vampire movies have come from Australia and New Zealand. These essays also look at vampire films through lenses of gender, post-colonialism, camp, and otherness as well as the evolution of the vampiric character in cinema worldwide, together constituting a mosaic of the cinematic undead.