Our Vampires Are Different/Literature

• The original Dracula created by Bram Stoker actually. Sunlight just reduces his powers, crosses and garlic just annoy him (but work on vampires he creates), he ages backwards after feeding, he can transform into a bat, wolf, smoke, or "elemental dust", his very presence is hypnotic, he can create a psychic link with a victim he feeds his blood to...
  • The vampires in this story can also walk through impossibly narrow gaps, as if they became two-dimensional for the act.
• In the Thrall series by C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp, the Thrall are parasites that lay eggs in the bodies of psychics. Not only are they not immortal, they make the Host infertile, use up the body's resources, and die within 3-4 years. They have dependent Herd members to feed on, and if a queen dies without laying lasting eggs in a new host, all of the people she "made" die.
• The Laura Caxton series by David Wellington avoids most of the tropes of the genre, preferring to return vampire fiction to its roots as a subgenre of horror instead of romance. Wellington's vampires are completely inhuman. They reproduce by inviting suitable humans to share the curse, who must then commit suicide to actually turn (no I Hate You, Vampire Dad here.) Once turned they become deathly pale, lose all their body hair and grow pointed ears. All their teeth are replaced by razor-sharp fangs. They need blood in the way that a heroin addict needs his next fix, which soon replaces their former personality with that of a violently psychotic junkie (something remarked on in the books.) They are ridiculously strong, ripping apart steel plates like tissue paper, all but invulnerable (when well-fed bullets just bounce off them) and powerfully psychic, but are expressly never stronger than on the night they rise. In addition to all of this, they can raise their victims (of which there will be many) as a kind of short-lived zombie, which will, as its first act in unlife, proceed to rip off its own face out of self-hatred. On the downside, they literally die and rot every day when the sun rises, complete with maggots. Although they can potentially live forever, they can only move by their own power for sixty or seventy years, after which they can't feed their growing hunger for blood by themselves anymore. This causes them to become immobile and skeletized and forced to rely on their offspring for nutrition. Coupled with their self-destructive need to feed, this means that the oldest vampire in existence is at most 200 years old.
• In Under a Velvet Cloak, from Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, the vampire colony does just fine with small amounts of blood obtained from local livestock. Their major interaction with ordinary humans is for sex (they do have high sex drives). They're nocturnal (although one with unusual powers pre-turning does manage to come up with a way to function during the day). Turning involves reciprocal consumption of blood, although one female character discovers to her sorrow that conversion while pregnant has major consequences for the unborn child. These vampires can be (and are) killed by hacking them into pieces during daylight.
• Amelia Atwater Rhodes' vampires take nearly every vampire trope in existence and throw them out the window. They don't have any of the usual vampire weaknesses, and are all very much human in their emotions and motivations. They can, on the other hand, be killed by a stake through the heart, decapitation, etc. and need to drink blood to survive. While they are not vulnerable to sunlight, most adapt to a nocturnal schedule. There is a ritual to changing a human into a vampire, requiring the exchange of blood. A vampire's power post-bite is determined by how much they fought the change, so vampires who were changed by force tend to be exceptionally powerful. Almost all of them have Black Eyes of Evil.
  • The vampires also have very few weaknesses outside of a particular Witch Species' blood. Unless said witch consents under some specific conditions.
  • Some of the vampires have use of mental powers and Voluntary Shapeshifting if the vampire in question was a shapeshifter before being turned or if the vampire has a particularly strong sense of self, then the shapeshift is something akin to casting a glamour that isn't superficial.
  • More specialized powers, like the ability to dreamwalk, are specific to certain vampire lines. One vampire line, prizing strength, uses whether or not a victim fights against the bite as the criterion for who becomes a vampire and who becomes dinner.
  • At the same time subverted by another particular vampire line whose originator ran afoul of one of the aforementioned witches is cursed with some of the traditional vampire weaknesses, including the aversion to holy items. Unfortunately, 'holy' has a loose definition and anything the vampire loves or holds precious becomes anathema.
• In the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, vampires become weak if they don't drink blood every once in a while. Most vampires keep a "flock" of humans at their house to feed on. They can avoid killing if they want to, but only Stefan really makes an effort to do so. Being a vampire's "sheep" has fringe benefits - it extends your natural lifespan, and gives you resistance to blood-borne diseases like HIV or leukemia. Vampires are dead during the day (but they don't need to return to their original coffin - at one point, Stefan spends the day in Mercy's closet), but come back to unlife at night. They can be killed by the standard methods, but the best one is fire.
  • Beyond that, the circumstances under which any particular vampire is created can sometimes provide them with unique abilities shared by few, if any, of their own kind. Examples include Stefan's ability to teleport, and Blackwood's power to acquire the supernatural abilities of his nonhuman victims.
• In Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, vampires are a predatory subspecies of humanity, living alongside, feeding, and interbreeding with humans. Being bitten by a vampire doesn't transform the victim into a vampire. Giving birth to a vampire/human fetus results in Death by Childbirth, and the Half-Human Hybrid will manifest the thirst for blood at puberty. Interestingly, the younger vampires have lost a lot of the traditional vampire weaknesses, such as aversion to sunlight, along with their fangs, because of their mixed human ancestry. The older vampires still retain these traits.
• Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files have so far shown us three different kinds of vampires (White Court, Red Court, and Black Court), splitting up different traits and weaknesses among them. A fourth, the Jade Court, has been mentioned but not not described in detail.
  • Black Court: Rotting corpses, ridiculously strong and tough but they have ALL of the typical vampire weaknesses. In the Dresdenverse, Bram Stoker was urged to write Dracula at the behest of the White Court, so that all of humanity would know about the weaknesses of the Black Court. This led to the slaughter of most of the Black Court, with only the strongest and most craven of its members surviving. Mind you, it's the weaknesses as described in Stoker's novel, so don't count on what you think of as the "typical" vampire weaknesses. If you're following the usual movie vamp tropes instead of Stoker, you'll find the hard way that sunlight doesn't equal instant death (Black Court vampires mostly just go dormant during the day, but more powerful ones can get by without even that, though their powers are reduced) and they have these things called 'rib cages' when it comes to staking.
  • Red Court: Hairless, anthropomorphic bat-things in human disguises. Have weaknesses to holy objects and sunlight, but can be killed by old fashioned violence--the belly, which are where one stores the blood it drinks, is a particularly soft target, and bursting the belly robs the vampire of its strength. Ensnare people due to their saliva being a powerful narcotic. Based mostly in South America, with some strong indications that either they were or inspired the ancient Mayan/Aztec gods that demanded blood sacrifice. They definitely have an ancient Mayan/Aztec motif to them. A human who has been infected does not totally lose him- or herself to bloodlust until they first kill a human through feeding--even then, they do retain at least some of their human personality.
    • As of the latest book, Changes, the population of the Red Court seems to have been completely eliminated via Harry using a "bloodline curse" to kill everyone in the Red King's "bloodline" - in other words, killing all Red Court vampires and restoring the partially-turned.
  • White Court: Nearly indistinguishable from humans, their main difference is that they have a demon attached to them at soul-level, which in return for being fed grants them agelessness, and they can become superhumanly swift and strong for short periods of time. None of the traditional vampire killing tactics effect them (including sunlight) but they are the most mortal. Feed on life force by inducing emotion (fear, lust, or depression) and can be repelled or harmed by their opposite emotion (courage, love, hope). Dresden compares the White Court vamps to succubi on several occasions. White court vampires can not be 'created' in the traditional sense of 'infecting' others with vampirism, they must be born into it.
  • The Jade Court has been mentioned by a Japanese Knight of the Cross in Death Masks, but has never appeared in the books. Presumably, they cover the Asian vampires, which are quite different from Western ones.
  • Per Word of God, there are three more courts, for a total of seven now six. However, the remaining three aren't very powerful or numerous, and as such aren't much more than a blip on the supernatural community's radar.
  • The "must be invited in" thing applies to all magical creatures and magic-users in the Dresdenverse, including mortal wizards. A home has a magical threshold from the hearts of those who live there, and you can't forcibly breach it without cost.
    • To clarify, all supernatural creatures are affected by the threshold of a lived in home. The more powerful the supernatural creature, the more difficult it is to pass through (and the more of your power you give up when you do). This can be bypassed by particularly powerful creatures (such as the Queens of the Sidhe) who are strong enough that even a small piece of them can do a lot of damage, and weaker creatures (such as pixies) are relatively unaffected. Thresholds are used as the anchor for wards, which make entering a home even more dangerous for supernatural creatures (or even non-supernatural people, if the wards are done right).
    • Actually, as per Word of God, the White Court vampires are human enough to be able to enter uninvited, unless they are in the grips of.. eh... Not bloodlust, but are driven purely by their hunger.
• While Artemis Fowl doesn't seem to have any vampires in sight (yet), The People in general have some vampire traits- pale, cannot enter a human dwelling without permission (they risk losing their magic), and sunlight is deadly or at least very harmful to them, as is holy water (though it can be countered by magical water).
• Vampires in the Undead and ___ series by Mary Janice Davidson are relatively "traditional" -- they need to feed on blood, can't take the daylight, get burned by holy water, and so on. Not only does the cross hurt them, but hearing "holy names" (God and Jesus) does the same thing. The main character, Betsy the Vampire Queen, is a prophesied exception and is unaffected by most of the rules.
• The vampires in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter usually look like normal humans. But when they're on the attack, their fangs become prominent and the pupils of their eyes dialate to the point where their eyes are entirely black. Exposure to sunlight does not kill them, but they are sensitive to it. A newborn vampire will blister in the sun, but as time goes on they adjust to being able to stand it for periods of time. One thing that does not adjust is their eyes, so they wear dark glasses when out in sunlight.(And many carry parasols for additional shielding.) Killing them can be done by burning, decapitation, or a stab through the heart.(While this last one can be done by the traditional wooden stake, other weapons work as well. A few include a knife, crossbow, and the ax, which is Abe's weapon of choice.) They can also be photographed and can only kill people by biting/sucking(turning requires the human to drink THEIR blood. The older vampires can also turn a fresh corpse, but the method is not explained.) Other than that, they're typical vampires.(Feed on blood, cold temperature, etc.)
• Vampire-like creatures appear in English folklore dating back to the Middle Ages, with Walter Map and William of Newburgh being two prominent vampire story tellers. Not too many English vampire tales after that date, though.
• Richard, a vampire in Sue Dent's Christian werewolves-and-vampires novel Never Ceese needs blood to survive, but copes with it in a novel way -- he tells a sob story to people on the Internet about his mother needing blood transfusions and gets donations to live on. He still occasionally craves blood from a living animal, but can cool his urges by draining blood from livestock. One of the biggest weaknesses of vampires focused on in the book is that vampirism is a "curse" that prevents a vampire from interacting with, speaking of, or even thinking of anything holy -- not just crosses, but Bible verses, God himself, churches, etc. Richard, with help of a mentor, can fight against it enough that he can manage to quote John 3:16 ("For God so loved the world..."), but still has to go through quite a bit of pain to do it.
• Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is not traditional about its vampires. For example, they can go on just fine without drinking blood. Kettle, the undead child, however does prey on people for their blood, and after killing and draining one hundred passers-by she has accumulated enough lifeforce to turn into a living little girl.
• While Silas in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is never explicitly called the v-word or seen drinking blood, the evidence leaves little to the imagination: active only at night, no reflection, flight, hypnotic abilities, sleeps in a dirt lined box "when away from home", etc.
• In Neverwhere, Lamia and the other Velvet can fit to this trope, given that they drink life itself - doing this very sensually.
• And then there's Bunnicula, from the Bunnicula series of children's books by James and Deborah Howe. You're reading that right. A vampire bunny, yes. He sucks the juice out of vegetables. A good bit of The Celery Stalks at Midnight was spent finding vegetables he had drained and staking them with toothpicks.
• In The Wheel of Time, there is the Gholam. Six were made 3000 years before the story begins, but only one survived up until the current timeline. They are immune to the series resident magic, regenerate any wounds instantly, have amazing reflexes [being able to catch a thrown knife out of the air without even trying], can squeeze through the tiniest gaps, have insane strength and agility, and completely drain a victims blood dry [they also feed on nothing else]. They are also immune to sunlight, and all other traditional vampire weaknesses.
  • Though they are vulnerable to certain Ter'Angreal, which could be considered analogous to holy symbols.
• Anne Rice, who can take a lot of the credit for the modern bisexually curious, gender-ambiguous portrayal of vampires, had them originating through accident: an Egyptian Queen was accidentally bonded to a mostly harmless (if annoying) spirit during an assassination attempt, and became the first vampire. The more distant a vampire's connection to the oldest vampires, the weaker they were. One attempt to end the curse (by exposing the Queen and her husband) to the sun resulted in their skin barely darkening, older vampires being mildly discomforted, and "younger" vampires bursting into flame and dying. The vampire weaknesses to religious artifacts were psychological: Lestat, a non-religious (almost atheist) person in life, found they didn't affect him at all. Interestingly, despite this, it is revealed in later books that God and Jesus exist, and Lestat actually meets Him. And apparently, neither God nor Jesus give much of a damn about Lestat being a mass-murdering monstrosity. (Wasn't there a commandment against murder?)
  • Traditionally, the Christian punishment for sin comes after you die. Being immortal might delay this for a while, but the fun has to end eventually.
  • Although, it's stated at the end of Memnoch the Devil that Lestat isn't sure if what he experienced was really Christ and God, or a trick of spirits. And since Maharet, one of the elders, thinks he's completely mental, it's possible it was all just a guilt-induced hallucination. (Later books never clear this up, either, though the only evidence against it is the existence of Veronica's Veil, which could easily be the replica Roger meant to give his daughter.)
  • Anne Rice's vampires seem to have a partially crystalline biology: Their skin becomes less porous and smoother as they age. Possibly this explains their growing resistance to sunlight.
• In the Russian Night Watch book series, vampires can stand in direct sunlight without ill effects (though it annoys them and dulls their senses), have no issues with garlic or religious artifacts - moreover, it's revealed that most of the common vampire-related beliefs were spread by the vampires themselves in order to give humans a false sense of security (it's implied that Stoker was either a vampire or impelled by them in his work). Nor are they undeathly pale or cold - they seem perfectly healthy and normal because they are living off of others' lives. Alcohol, on the other hand, has much the same effect as holy water is supposed to - in one scene, the main character splashes a vampire he's fighting with vodka from his hip flask. Silver bullets and stakes slow them down, but neither is fatal. However, they can't enter another person's dwelling uninvited. They do reflect in mirrors, even when hidden from a naked eye, since they achieve invisibility by manipulating minds of surrounding people and forcing them to ignore them. They are stronger and faster than normal humans and possess heightened regenerative abilities. The more powerful vampires can change shapes, fly and hypnotize, but such vampires are rare. Their bite is not viral and the Embrace can only happened by mutual consent from the Sire and the Child. Being Embraced in infancy doesn't prevent a vampire from maturing physically. Vampires can reproduce, although only once after the Embrace whereupon they become sterile. No Dhampires here - a union of a vampire and human will result in a regular human baby. Like all supernatural creatures in the Watch universe, they can enter the Twilight, another "level" of reality that renders them invisible to the mundane population and are even much more comfortable there then the "regular" Others. Also, like all supernatural creatures in the Watch universe, they can only legally prey on humans if they have proper licenses, which forces them to rely on blood banks as primary source of sustenance. Some vampires attempt to feed without said license, forcing the Night Watch to hunt them down. Despite these advantages over humans, amongst the 'others' they are pretty much the lowest of the low and often used as cannon fodder by the more senior dark others.
  • With the higher ranked vampires, it's a different story though, with them being able to effortlessly slaughter most other others. Then you have the Ultimate Vampire, Kostya who was effectively invincible, and only died via burning up on re-entry into outer space.
  • Both light and dark others actually act as 'psi-vampires' amongst other methods they can draw energy by draining people's good and bad emotions respectively.
• Vampires in the Strain by Guillermo Del Toro are almost made specifically to counter the romantisizing of the undead. Vampires in this series lose all their hair, their genitals, and grow a talon from thir middle fingers. Their organs are simplified into a single mass for processing and digesting blood, and as they don't need to breathe, their lungs invert and transform into a six-foot-long prehensile stinger tongue. Because of their lack of lungs, they can't talk, but are telepathic. Vampires in this series are the result of blood-consuming worms that the lurk in their bloodstreams that rewrite human DNA. Also, only the Ancients, the seven original vampires are actually sentient. The rest are simply drones that are commanded by their makers.
  • As for their weaknesses, silver and sunlight kill them because of their germicidal properties breaking down their bacteria-dependant biologies. They are at least partially supernatural, however, because they can't cross running water, and they have very odd reflections in silver-backed mirrors.
• In Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga, almost all of a vampire's supposed weakness are psychological. Any vampire who actually believes that sunlight will destroy them will be destroyed by it, but one who doesn't believe can walk around during the day comfortably. The Roman Catholic Church actually captured many early vampires and brain washed them into believing these things would kill them in order to control them. The only thing actually capable of harming a vampire is silver. In the third book of the series, though, a serum is invented that will stop a vampire's cellular reconstructive abilities and allow them to be killed.
• The vampires of Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola are pretty basic (true vampires create wraiths when they feed, they turn into bats, they are afraid of crosses, etc.). The difference is that they were awakened by the deaths from World War I and when they started feeding on live humans, it started the Spanish Flu.
• The vampires in The Saga of Darren Shan lack fangs and the ability to turn into bats, and while very fast and Made of Iron can be killed by mundane weapons. They lack most traditional vampire weaknesses except sunlight, which results in severe sunburn/sunstroke that can kill within hours. They're not immortal, but age at 1/10th the normal rate. They can be seen in mirrors, but appear as unrecognisable blurs on camera due to the vibration of their molecules. Their most supernatural power is "flitting", which lets them vibrate at such high speed that they can run from one side of a city to the other within minutes (Mr. Crepsley uses the static buildup to pick locks). There's also a subspecies of purple-skinned Exclusively Evil vampires called the Vampaneze.
  • Vampires also have a superstitious Proud Warrior Race Guy culture, and many powers and behaviours attributed to vampires are explained as distorted details (for instance, wolves are sacred to them, they believe that dying in running water traps a person's soul on earth, and they execute criminals by repeatedly dropping them into pits of stakes). They are ruled by the Vampire Council, who call a worldwide meeting and festival at Vampire Mountain every few decades. The Council consists of Princes who vote on matters and select Generals, who lead and teach lesser vampires. Oh, and they refuse to use guns - vampaneze take it further and refuse to use all ranged weapons.
  • For more differences, the vampires never kill their victims; they knock them unconscious with their breath, open a vein with their ultra-sharp and hard fingernails, drink some blood, and use their healing saliva to close the cut. The vampaneze, on the other hand, drain their victims completely, which eventually gave them purple skin, red eyes, and red fingernails. In either case, fully draining someone's blood transfers part of the victim's soul and memories to the vampaneze - vampires do this only if the person is willing. They can survive on animal and bottled blood for a while, but it's less effective. Vampire blood itself is highly poisonous when ingested, causing symptoms similar to rabies.
  • They're completely sterile, "blooding" humans by cutting their fingertips and the human's and transferring blood between them. Half-vampires are created by transferring less blood than normal, and sometimes serve as willing assistants to full vampires. They have about half the abilities of full vampires (aging at 1/5th the normal rate, etc.) and cannot flit, but are unaffected by sunlight. While they require less blood, this is portrayed as a bad thing, since by the time a reluctant half-vampire needs blood to survive he may be too weak to get it. After about 10-15 years they undergo "The Purge", in which their vampire cells take over their body in a sort of puberty-on-drugs and convert them into full vampires.
• Simon R. Green's vampires (only seen in brief detail in Hawk And Fisher) fall under the "rotting corpse that clawed out of its grave" category, right down to mold growing on the skin. They generally have a servant known as a Judas Goat, who (by virtue of appearing outwardly sane, unlike Dracula's Renfield) acts as the vampire's protector.
  • Another series of books, by Simon R. Green, Deathstalker, includes a race of humanoids who have had their blood flushed out of their systems, and replaced with a liquid that basically makes them immortal. This liquid is also a well-known drug. These beings are known as Wampyrs, and they freely distribute vials of their blood in a known rat's nest the titular Deathstalker and his entourage eventually end up on. The love interest, upon reaching this rat's nest, proclaims that she has been hooked on Wampyr blood before, and sweated it out.
  • And in his Nightside series, Green plays vampirism for laughs: the taps at Strangefellows can dispense blood for polite vampire customers, or spray holy seltzer water to force rude ones to assume bat-form and flee. Usually while other customers throw things at them.

He gives them pretty much the same treatment that he gives everything else supernatural (yes, including werewolves) in the Secret Histories and Nightside novels: put it in as a plot device with almost no explanation why it works that way, and plays it for laughs.

• Barbara Hambly's three novels featuring vampires -- Those Who Hunt the Night (aka Immortal Blood), Travelling with the Dead, and Blood Maidens -- tweak the concept quite a bit: Vampires grow slowly more resistant to their banes (silver, certain woods, sunlight) as they age past their "death". This comes with occasional side effects: Don Simon Ysidro and his sire Rhys developed a condition called bleaching, where they turned into near-albinos, and the Bey of Constantinople became unable to fully create new vampires -- attempts simply produced a functioning mind in a rotting body. They're also psychic, able to affect people's minds -- the famed "dissolve into mist" act is just mentally blanking a person's ability to focus on them, and since they feed on the psychic energies of their prey's death-by-bite, they cannot feed without killing. They all cast psychic glamours that improve their appearance -- even the ones that aren't vain about their appearance prefer to at least seem alive, which without the glamour it's immediately obvious they're not. They avoid mirrors not because they aren't reflected, but because they are, and the mirror shows their true unglamourous appearance.
• Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series keeps some tropes, tosses some, and invents a couple new ones.
  • When vampires are starved for blood, they seem invariably to pick a target of their gender preference and are inclined to have sex with it while feeding from it, whether the target is willing or not. Ew.
  • When vampires are staked, their bodies do disintegrate into flaky ash, but it isn't necessarily instantaneous. It can be, or it can take a few minutes.
  • Sharing blood is an erotic experience on par with sex if the vampire has an emotional attachment to the person sharing it.
  • Vampires regard themselves as a different, superior species from humans, seeming to be embarrassed by [or forgotten] that they were human once.
  • Vamps can and do just stop and go into what Sookie calls "vampire downtime", where they become statues until something needs their attention.
  • Fairy blood is a particular delicacy to vampires, nigh-irresistible.
  • Vampires have complex and convoluted politics and laws.
  • The human world is aware of vampires, and has varying reactions to this knowledge. Despite this, Arbitrary Skepticism prevails.
  • The creation of synthetic blood is what caused the vampire populace to go public. They can drink it and survive on it, but they still prefer it straight from the real source. Truth in Television indicates synthetic blood is becoming available in Real Life. Let's hope it stops there.
• In The Hollows series by Kim Harrison, the saliva contains neurotransmitters that make the pain of a vampire's bite feel like pleasure. Vampires can also sensitize their victim's bite so that only that vampire can affect the victim, leaving the victim mentally bound to that vampire. There are two kinds of vampires, living and undead.
  • Living vampires are normal humans infected with the vampire virus. They are divided into two groups, high- and low-blood.
  • Low-blood vampires are normal humans that have been infected by an undead vampire, and have only a small amount of the benefits the virus grants, such as increased strength and speed, as well as the craving for blood. When low-blood vampires die, be it of natural causes or otherwise, they simply die like any other human, unless an undead vampire is there at the moment of death to bring them back as an undead.
  • High-blood vampires are vampires that were born already infected by the virus, and having been their development in the womb influenced by it. They have increased strength and speed, more so than low-blood vamps, but not as much as the undead. They also have a greater craving for blood than low-blood vampires, but it is not essential to their existence. When a high-blood vamp dies, no matter the cause, they rise again as an undead the next sundown. When vampires become undead, they gain the full physical benefits of the vampire virus, but lose their souls in the process. They now have the ability to turn humans into vampires and bespell even unwilling hosts.
  • Vampires spend most of the money made during their human lifetimes in order to procure spells that will keep them looking young and immortal. They don't automatically stay permanently fixed in the bloom of youth at the time of death. They age into horrible decrepit-looking monsters.
• The changers in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath are never described as vampires but follow a lot of vampire tropes. They are created by sex, it seems, by coupling with vile, corrupted creatures of Perimal Darkling, the crawling, infectious chaos. The Darkling influence in them gives them long life, and the ability to shape-shift, both to mimic other humans and to take on a bat-like flying form. They become dependent on blood for energy, and have superhuman speed and toughness. They shun sunlight to a degree but can endure it, but fire is fatal to them, since their corrupted blood is intensely flammable. A vampirish trait is also seen in some Shanir (God-touched) Kencyr; Randiroc, for instance, can only consume blood, milk and honey, and the latter hurts his teeth.
• Nina Kiriki Hoffman's Spirits That Walk In Shadow features a species of psychic vampires called viri. These Emotion Eaters feed on both positive and negative emotions and have the ability to sense and manipulate the feelings of others. They can take any shape, and it is implied they can even become inanimate objects, though they usually take the appearance of attractive humans for hunting purposes. They have the ability to instinctively locate lonely humans with emotional voids in their lives, and take on the form and persona of the ideal substitute parent, child, friend, lover, etc. They can put humans in trances and erase memories, and also induce feelings of happiness and attraction in their presence, along with any other feeling they want to cause. What's especially unique is their reproductive cycle. When they drain an excessive amount of emotional energy, they put on more physical mass until they finally split and form a new viri through binary fission. Feeding from other types of magical beings gives them more energy than feeding from humans, sometimes too much to handle. Viri can only be killed by other viri, so there are certain individuals of the species that act as vigilante law enforcers, to stop other viri who threaten The Masquerade or treat victims with excessive cruelty i.e. leaving them in a vegetative state or inducing severe depression to feed off of negative feelings instead of positive ones.
• In Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series, vampirism is referred to as the Vyrus. Once somebody has been infected by the Vyrus, they must drink blood regularly or else suffer severe withdrawal symptoms. The more they drink, the stronger they are and drinking blood also slows the aging process. If the Vyrus is starved for too long it takes the body over, producing a brief period of incredible strength and speed that normal vampires cannot hope to match. Drinking blood will cure most injuries, but if a vampire should lose a finger or an eye, it won't grow back. Destroying the head or the heart will kill them. Even limited exposure to sunlight (going out for a brief period of time with all available areas of skin well covered) will burn them badly and complete exposure to sunlight will cause the body to swell up with multiple tumours in a matter of minutes.
• Catherine Jinks' Reformed Vampire Support Group is basically made of this trope. Not only are vampires not supernaturally fast, strong, or sexy, but they're actually much weaker than average humans. They're frozen at the age they were when changed, clinically dead from dawn to dusk, susceptible to both sunlight and artificial light (the protagonist, Nina, mentions that her eyes bleed from looking at streetlamps), and have very weak stomachs. Being staked through the heart causes them to disintegrate into ash. Other wounds, while not causing death, never heal. After many years, a vampire often becomes cowardly and apathetic, rarely leaving his or her home. In addition, becoming a vampire makes one less attractive; the novel's vampires are all described as extremely thin and sallow.
• Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D (novels): The vampires do suffer from many of the traditional weaknesses outlined here, but none of the humans ever know this, due to long years of conditioning against the information by the vampires who ruled humanity for centuries after the nuclear war that led to the setting. This lends the titular character an unexpected advantage on several occasions.
• In Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot, the most powerful vampire (Barlow) must lie still in his coffin during the day, but is still conscious and can use psychic projection and control the will of humans if they look in his eyes. The humans that he bites turn into a kind of semi-conscious vampiric drone, which exist primarily to serve him and infect others.
  • Vampires also appear in the Dark Tower series, in which they are classified into three types. Both Type I and Type II vampires are fairly traditional; the former are ancient and can transform humans into Type II's. (Crosses work, but are subject to the power of faith. The priest from Salem's Lot, whose cross failed when his faith did, reappears and is able to ward them off with belief alone.) Type III vampires drink blood, but are immune to sunlight, and cannot turn people into other vampires, although they can pass HIV. They disappear when killed.
    • In The Little Sisters of Eluria, the titular sisters. Pretend to be healers, use a strain of bugs for said healing... and seem to transform into these bugs upon death. Cannot leave each other for long, cannot touch religious symbols, immune to bullets, immune to sun, cast no shadow.
• The Damon Knight short story Eripmav features the ultimate in Our Vampires Are Different: It's a vampire from a species of sapient plants. Naturally, it's a sap-sucker.
  • And vulnerable to a steak through the heart.
• In The Vampire Earth series by E.E. Knight, most people are familiar with Reapers, nearly indestructible beasts that drink human blood to survive, and drain human life force to transmit to their masters. They are sluggish and half-blind in sunlight, but are not actually harmed significantly by it. Their masters, psychic aliens that eat human life force, have hypnotic powers, making it dangerous to meet their eyes.
• Three kinds of vampires appear in Mercedes Lackey's Children of the Night.

1. 1. "Classic" Western vampires. The vampire Andre explains to the protagonist that some of the folklore is true, but some was made up. Specifically, he describes the "crossing water" limitation as "We are territorial, and often mark our borders with rivers. You might as well say that we do not cross major roads, or mountain ranges." He also has Super Strength, no reflection, serious burns from sunlight (but managed to escape captivity and cross half the city to find shelter), and greater damage from wooden weapons. However, he's not affected by garlic (in fact, makes a joke about being able to smell it from some chicken soup), and when confronted with a cross takes it out of her hand, kisses it and returns it to her. Drawing blood gives the "victim" intense pleasure, too.
   2. The "psi-vamp", an Emotion Eater. Psi-vamps can draw from "higher" energies (excitement, pleasure), or from the "darker' ones -- anger, hatred, fear. They can also directly trigger the emotions they want from their victims, and if they feed fully can kill or "burn out" a victim. They have Super Strength, can live entirely off the energies (don't need to eat, and don't derive value from it anyway), but are badly affected by sunlight or any bright light (worse than Andre, the classic vampire). A small band at a club is changed into psi-vamps when they take a strange new drug - the one who doesn't change is killed and replaced by the third kind.
   3. The gaki, one of the types from Japan. Apparently there are several types. Harmless ones feed on smoke, perfume, music, etc, but there are three that are killers: blood, fear, and soul. The gaki in this one is a souleater; its natural form is like a cloud, and it can take the form of its victims. It is vulnerable only in the latter state. It teams up with the psi-vamps because they have different weaknesses and eat different parts of the victim.

• The vampires in Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist possess most of the classic vampire features, but also have a number of deviations from the norm; a stake to the chest just above the heart kills them because they have a second rudimentary brain there, their fangs can be grown at will (along with claws and a wing-like membrane), and vampires who are killed in any way except sunlight, fire or staking will continue on as mostly mindless "undead", who are extremely strong and seem to be nearly unkillable (fire is apparently all that will put them down for good). Eli also subverts the whole "sexually ambiguous vampire" trope by actually being a cross-dressing boy whose genitalia were removed by the vampire who bit him.
  • Furthermore, cats seem to have a natural aversion to vampires and will try to attack them.
• In Brian Lumley's Necroscope series of novels, vampires have one of the strangest life cycles imaginable. They start out as mushrooms which give off spores which infect people (or other animals - if no humans are accessible, they'll start with something else and work their way up by host-hopping). The spore-infection develops into a slug which fuses to the nervous system, granting vampiric powers and weaknesses (which in this case include the ability to morph and shape flesh like play-doh). They also, obviously, become hideously murderous and sociopathic. The slug can, at least for a time, leave its host for a new one or to escape if the body is being killed. In this way, the "vampire" is actually the slug and not the host, but the two basically become one. If a vampire truly is killed, more mushrooms come from its body. The hosts can lay eggs which then infest other people, creating a new worm. They are still vulnerable to daylight, silver and garlic, and can be killed by bubonic plague and leprosy. They can also create heinous Body Horror monstrosities, including flying mounts and such.
• Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, in a world where most of the human population have been transformed into vampires by a plague. The novel goes to great length to set up biological and anatomical reasons for why these vampires behave in accordance with traditional vampire tropes, i.e. psychological aversion to mirrors and religious symbols, lack of skin pigmentation causing intense pain on exposure to sunlight, and so on. They are, however, extraordinarily stupid, almost like zombies, sometimes incoherent, not even bothering to employ tactics to try and draw Neville out, or traps (the only tactic shown are female vampires taking off their clothes to try and entice the sex-starved Neville out, and Ben's psychological war and his constant hiding - it's stated Ben is far smarter than the rest of the vampires for some bizarre reason). Many future vampire novels drew on the book for its inspiration. Its major film adaptations, The Omega Man and the eponymous 2007 film, retain the photophobia and albinism but drop the vampire conceit -- The Omega Man simply refers to them as mutants, and I Am Legend gives them no particular name (though they are referred to as "Dark-Seekers").
  • The Vincent Price B-film The Last Man On Earth, also based(-ish) on the story, does refer to them as Vampires, but also plays up the disease/sci fi elements.
• Robin McKinley's Sunshine has vampirism being technically illegal in a world full of various types of demons and other supernatural beings which are as morally varied as normal people. Wood is only the best option for staking (specifically applewood from trees with mistletoe in them), as other materials may work with much more difficulty. In contrast to other styles of 'aging,' the older a vampire gets the weaker he is physically, to the point where even reflected sunlight (i.e., moonlight) can burn them, although they typically get increased Psychic Powers and run gangs in compensation. There are "different" ways of being vampires, however, meaning there is at least one friendly (well, not obsessively homicidal, non-sadistic) vampire.
  • Very old vampires can't even say the word "Sunshine" or even "ray" -- conveniently for the heroine, because they also have name magic, and her nicknames are "Sunshine" and "Rae" (short for "Raven").
• Stationery Voyagers opts for calling them Mosquatlons. They operate by the following rules: 1) They don't tolerate UV radiation; nor high concentrations of other forms of radiation. They can tolerate only the radiation from normal lights and from the bananas they eat. They begin to burn up immediately in sunlight. 2) They are based on mosquitoes, not bats. 3) In spite their incredible healing factors, polonium is like kryptonite to them. It doesn't help that polonium is radioactive. Anti-Mosquatlon ammunition is either made of UV rounds or of polonium bullets. 4) Mosquatlons are a subspecies of Mankind. They are under the Drisalian Curse. They can procreate new Mosquatlons, but they cannot "turn" a Mantithian into a Mosquatlon. 5) They use up iron and potassium quickly. They can replenish both with pills and syringes containing liquid mineral supplements. They can otherwise eat normal food. Due to their need for potassium, they tend to crave bananas. 6) They don't have fangs. They have retractable suction tubes on the roofs of their mouths, which they refer to as their "proboscides." If they bite someone's neck, it will look like two really large mosquito bites. 7) They can move with superhuman speed; but cannot teleport. They also possess superhuman strength, but cannot manipulate the Law of Transfer of Momentum the way a Whiteout Mikloche Warrior can. They can also leap 20 yards high if they get a running start, but cannot fly like an advanced Mikloche Warrior can. 8) They love all things Dieselpunk. They also like Norman Rockwell art. 9) They may have any number of eye colors by-default. Their eyes turn bright green when they're excited/angered/aroused. 10) They can live to be about 800 years old. 11) To them, all garlic means is bad breath. It annoys them; but doesn't pose any real threat.
• In China Mieville's The Scar, the Brucolac, a member of a species known as "vampirs", has many of the usual traits, but is surprisingly ineffectual and comes from a land where vampires are basically nothing more than pathetic beggars and junkies looking for their next hit.
• Christopher Moore's vampires in Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck lose consciousness when the sun rises, heal rapidly (faster if they've fed recently), suffer burns on any body part exposed to sunlight, can be drowned or frozen and come back to life, turn into mist at will, see auras (particularly if the person is sick), vomit up anything they've consumed that isn't blood, get a sexual thrill from feeding, live for hundreds of years at least, and when turned, lose all physical traits associated with the life they've led, such as scars, freckles, bent toes from wearing shoes, etc. They're also "locked" into the physical state they were at when they died -- while Jody's mostly okay with being a vampire, she angsts that she'll never lose those last five pounds.
  • They discovered in You Suck, though, that they CAN eat normal food if it has some human blood on or in it when they tried to feed on a drunk homeless guy and Jody got drunk herself. They determined that if the alcohol in the guys blood could affect them when, normally, they wouldn't be able to touch booze, then it would work on other things as well. Jody about has an orgasm when she discovers that she can have coffee and french fries again.
• C. E. Murphy's Heart of Stone features gargoyles along with vampires. Gargoyles turn to stone while the sun is up, and a gargoyle speculates that confusion is the source of the (incorrect) belief that vampires are harmed by daylight.
• Vampires in the Skulduggery Pleasant series can walk about during daylight, in forms which often look plain and uninteresting. They possess greater strength and agility than humans. When night comes, they rip their way out of their human forms, revealing hideous black, bug-eyed albino creatures, which are completely hairless, even stronger and faster than during the day, completely mindless to the point they will attack any living thing, whether it be friend or foe, and with mouths filled with razor sharp fangs. The transformation can be held off by taking a specially made serum, and a human infected with vampirism has a brief time in which they can be cured. They possess none of the traditional weaknesses and are incredibly durable (as Skulduggery says "The best thing for taking on vampires is lots of bullets"). The only weakness they really have is that ingesting salt water causes their throats to close up, suffocating them.
• Demonstrated in Welkin Weasels: Vampire Voles. The major vampire is a stoat, named Count Flistagga. Mustelids in the books raise rodents such as mice and voles for food. The villain bites herds of voles and ships them over to the city of Muggidrear in order to infect the citizens with the vampire virus. They're easily defeated, though; Bryony doesn't want to kill the infected voles and instead renders them harmless simply by ripping out their teeth while they sleep. (At the end of the book there's a throwaway line about them "annoying respectable mammals by slobbering over their necks in back alleys"). Flistagga is not so easily defeated, though. He ends up being Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by Monty. It's noted that he can cross running water, though most vampires don't like to, but he is vulnerable to sunlight, and literally cannot eat or drink anything other than blood which helps them to catch him when he won't join in the toast at a city ball because he can't drink the champagne. He also apparently can't actually fly, but he can use his cloak to glide and can scuttle headfirst down walls in the same way as the original Dracula.
• Vampires in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series come from a number of various "Bloodlines", but are considered biological entities with "just a touch" of magic (they don't cast reflections, for example). Some may be able to transform, while others have corpse-like features, and others suffer from blood frenzy. Religious symbols and even garlic only affect those vampires who believe they can. Sunlight only hurts younger undead, and silver only serves to counter their regeneration abilities; any sufficient organ damage (like, say, a stake through the heart) can kill them for good.
• On Larry Niven's Ringworld, vampires are non-sentient hominid predators that use hyper-sexy pheromones to make other hominids screw everyone in sight, allowing them to feed at leisure. Becoming a Pak protector can make them sentient, but the side effects of this ( loss of pheromones and all other sexual traits; switching to a diet of mashed tree-of-life root) means they don't really qualify as "vampires" any more.
• Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel Trilogy: stay with me, because this is kind of complicated. The main villain of the trilogy is the lorelei. She makes vampyres (a.k.a. darkangels, a.k.a. icari) by kidnapping little boys (although it's implied, in the third book, that she could have just as easily used girls). When they're sixteen, she gilds their hearts with lead, drinks all their blood, makes them a set of black wings, and sends them out into the world. At this stage, the darkangel is extremely beautiful. Once a year, he kidnaps a young woman, forces her to marry him, then throttles her, drinks her blood, and puts her soul in a little bottle around his neck. This doesn't kill the unfortunate women, just turns them into wraiths (something like a walking mummy), so the darkangel keeps his "wives" around. When he's done this to fourteen women, he returns to the lorelei, who drinks their souls and then his, which turns him hideously ugly. At this point he himself also starts feeding on souls as well as blood. However, a darkangel can be made human again during the fourteen-year period with the assistance of magic and The Power of Love. The lorelei's goal is to make seven of these vampyre sons and then take over the world. They're vulnerable to running water, a particular magic dagger, nightmares, and occasionally more mundane means (such as being attacked by a supernatural or, rather, Magitek-created guardian beast). If wounded, they neither bleed nor heal on their own; their skin must be sewn back together.
• In Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series, vampires don't have a lot of the common vampire traits. Their strength and skills are mostly dependent on their age and how closely their creator was related to the original vampire, Yaksha.
  • They're incredibly fast and strong. Sunlight makes them weaker, but doesn't kill them. They can be killed through pretty much any means as long as enough damage is done to them. Sita, the main character, takes a wooden stake through the heart (shrapnel from an explosion) and survives (though with a large scar that continuously aches and doesn't heal). Weaker vampires can be killed through lesser means such as bullets and knives. Stronger vampires can recover completely from massive wounds. Several of the stronger vampires are killed through explosions or having their heads chopped off.
  • They have no fangs; they use sharp nails to cut their victims' veins from which to drink. The older they are, the less blood they need to survive. Small amounts of a vampire's blood can be dripped onto a human's wounds to heal them. New vampires are created by a massive blood transfusion from the vampire to the human. Drinking (or getting a blood transfusion) from a stronger vampire can give a lesser vampire more strength or powers.
  • Other powers of older, stronger vampires include: mind control with eye contact, mind control without eye contact, "absorbing" moonlight to become as light as air.
• In Nick Polotta's Bureau 13 series, the characters use "scenario loads", which are ammo magazines preloaded with one silver bullet, one of blessed wood, another of cold iron, etc. "Well, the ones shot with silver just fell down, but the ones shot with wood turned to dust...." At one point, they turn to a cape filled with indexed pockets of assorted "banes", to deal with an unexpected were-squid.
• Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard pushes this trope to its limits, portraying vampires as silicon-based life forms from a pre-Cambrian period of Earth's history, roused from eons of hibernation when one of their kind was surgically implanted inside a human being. They combine features of vampires, sirens, sphynxes, and Pygmalian's statue.
• Terry Pratchett really goes to town with this trope in his Discworld novels. Specifically, everything you've ever heard about vampires is true on the Discworld, but the rules are not the same for any two vampires.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, Count Magpyr and his family appear to have overcome many stereotypical vampire weaknesses through conditioning (at least temporarily). By contrast, his uncle, "the old Count" (named Bela Lugosi) was quite willing to give people a chance to kill him, since he could always come back to life again. Later books demonstrate that vampirism on the Disc is more like an addiction than a physical affliction: vampires can give up these cravings (for human blood, at least), given time and something to obsess over besides blood (like photography, or coffee), though they remain inhuman. There's even a support group for "recovering vampires", the Uberwald Temperance League.
    • This is actually possible to do for any addiction in real life. It's called Sublimation.
  • In Reaper Man, Arthur Winkings becomes a vampire simply through inheriting a certain spooky mansion (which was, traditionally, inhabited by vampires, and tradition has this amount of power on the Discworld); as he half-jokingly puts it, he was bitten "by a lawyer". This means he is now capable of transforming into a bat, and forced to wear evening dress all the time. He does not suck blood from virgins, since his wife (who only acts like she's a vampire, and speaks in Vampire Vords if she doesn't forget to) wouldn't approve of that.
  • Discworld vampires are so diverse in their powers and vulnerabilities that those from two different villages in Uberwald will be vulnerable to different methods of destruction. In Carpe Jugulum, Nanny Ogg carefully questions a vampire as to which town he's from, then shoves the appropriate baneful item into his mouth when he replies.
  • One type of vampire requires a pair of carrots hammered in his ears as a part of the disposal method. As Nanny Ogg Lampshades, it must have been fun trying to figure that out through trial and error.
  • Otto Chriek, the Times iconographer, is a "stereotypical music-hall vampire" and has learned how to exploit this depending on who he's talking to and what they need from him. This allows him to be accepted in the city in a way that many other vampires aren't. Vimes even Lampshades Otto's unlikeliness:

"But yes ... Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully-cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on whom he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people. Make them laugh, and they're not afraid."

• • Undead invulnerabilities aside, note that Discworld vampires have NEVER managed to rise from the cat, as demonstrated in Witches Abroad.
• In Spider Robinson's Callahans Crosstime Saloon series, there's a vampire named Pyotr from Eastern Europe. He's the saloon's designated driver, and the reason why none of the saloon's patrons ever get hangovers (except for protagonist Jake, who has an unusual metabolism and only gets hangovers as a result of Pyotr). He spends all night in the saloon drinking ginger ale, and when he drives the patrons home, he syphons a bit of blood out of them, which gets him drunk. He crashes at the last guy's house each night.
  • He is described as having filtering glands in his oversized canines, and actually filters the alcohol (and nutrients) out of the blood of the patrons, leaving them without a hangover (but with the back of their neck being sore) in the morning.
• In the Destroyer series by Richard Ben Sapir and Warren Murphy, vampires are a religious order of blood drinkers who believe eating meat destroys the soul. Early vampires actually had supernatural powers, but a previous Master of Sinanju destroyed all but the leader, who has since recruited mere mortal vegetarians into the cult.
• In Justin Somper's Vampirates, most of the crew drink only once a week, and that from voluntary donors who are well-treated by the crew; the captain does not need blood at all. Also, Darcy can remain outside during the day by turning into the ship's figurehead.
• In the vampire romance novels of Kerrelyn Sparks, vampires burn in the sun and are allergic to silver. They can be killed through a stake and turn to dust. They are really, really strong and fest, they can teleport and can have a telepathic chit-chat... just that every vampire can hear their telepathic chit-chat what somehow defies the advantage of telepathy. They have to drink blood urgently, after "Be still my vampire heart" they can survive a maximum of three days before they turn into uncontrollable bloodsuckers, but the fangs "jump out" even if they are only hungry. Also, if they are sexually aroused their eyes become red. There are two known kinds of vampires:
  • The Malcontents are the evil race of vampires, they didn't care for their investments and therefore rarely have money. They see themselves as the true ones and feed from humans. They enjoy killing and torturing them and think of themselves as superior to normal vampires who already think to be superior from everyone else.
  • The Vamps are non-human-bloodsucking vampires who owe their existence to the ex-monk and chemical genius Roman Draganesti, the protagonist of the first book "How to marry a vampire millionaire". He has found a way to make artificial blood which not only saves thousands of human lives but also makes human-sucking futile and Roman very, very rich.
  • From the usual bloodtypes filled in bottles which have to be warmed up in microwaves he has developed a "fusion cuisine" with chocolood, bubbly blood (champagner blood), blood light (against the consequences of chocolood) and even blisky, which makes the scottish Highlands-Vampires very happy.
  • A serum is developed which can make vampires stay awake during the day, but for every day awake they age one year.
  • Thanks to Roman, young vampires of whom there is a blood sample can be made mortal again, but the process is risky.
  • Again thanks to Roman, it is possible to genetically engineer a vampire sperm so he can have a Half-Human Hybrid with a mortal woman, which doesn't seem to be neither vampire nor normal human.
• In the novel Blindsight, Science Fiction author Peter Watts has come up with another take on vampires: that they are predatory subspecies of humanity with specific genetic markers, including a neural miswiring in the visual cortex that causes epileptic seizures when near-perpendicular lines are seen (referred to as "the crucifix glitch"). This was not a major handicap in prehistoric times, but once architecture was invented, it caused the vampires' extinction. The genetic code for vampires is resurrected by a medical research corporation; Watts rationalizes each of vampires' traditional strengths and weaknesses using a scientific explanation in a PowerPoint (ostensibly from this corporation) on his Web site. Several traditional vampire traits are explained here as a result of their being nocturnal, solitary predators who hibernate for long periods of time to keep from hunting their slow-breeding prey into extinction. In the novel, a vampire is the captain of the protagonists' spaceship, and the other characters have vampire-based gene hacks to allow them to survive coldsleep: "Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire".
  • In an earlier Science Fiction novel of Peter Watts, Starfish, one character, the psychologist Yves Scanlon starts to think of the Rifters, modified humans, as vampires after he discovered numerous parallels; very pale skin, unusual eyes (the Rifters wear their eyecaps most of the time), sociopathy, increasingly abnormal behavior, no breath (in water), seemingly supernatural abilities, aversion to mirrors etc..
• Dan Wells's A Night of Blacker Darkness features vampires who are... amusingly pathetic, at best. All of the traditional weaknesses are true, but outside of immortality they've made all the advantages up in order to get human prey that thinks Freaky Is Cool to come willingly and please, please stop killing them. The gothic romance crowd doesn't find out until after they've been converted, and go off in a huff to found a book club.
  • Also, they have legends of the a vampire to come who will still be able to do everything normal humans can... which leads to a mundane, live human being mistaken for the Vampire Lord.
• Scott Westerfeld's young adult novel Peeps gives several scientifically backed explanations for vampiric symptoms: Vampirism is actually caused by a parasite that's evolved over centuries (thanks to natural selection) from a nasty case of rabies to a disease that causes the victim's mind to shun the things and people he/she loves. The pale, gaunt look of vampires is caused by the parasite burning away their bodies' calories, which also requires that they eat a lot to keep their energy up. Vampires won't perish from sunlight; they just really, really don't like it because the parasite knows that being out in the sun means a greater risk of capture and a dead host, which is also the same reason why vampires feel compelled to run away from the human beings they're familiar with. And that thing about the "vampire's kiss" is only the parasite's way of spreading itself to other hosts - for additional measure, the disease makes its victims easily turned on to make swapping fluids even more likely. Peeps's main character got lucky and became only a carrier, which gives him the superhuman strength and speed benefits without the "going insane and attacking the ones you love" condition. There are some other properties he finds out about vampires later on, but this entry is ridiculously long already, so read the book if you want to know what they are!
  • The sequel, The Last Days, extends on these ideas and talks more about why the parasite evolved.
  • Just adding more to the list of justified tropes, the "vampires have no reflection" is just the fact that they resent the appearance of anything that had significance in the parasite positives' past life; for example, they despise crosses because they were religious or have seen A LOT of crosses. It is also mentioned that if the vamp was a nerd, you can even use an iPod as the cross.
  • In the beginning of the novel, the main character is hunting a parasite positive girl who worshipped Elvis Presley before getting the virus. He uses paraphernalia of The King on her to invoke anathema - not because it's supernatural, but because of the scientific/biological reasons Westerfeld (brilliantly) explains.
• Family Bites by Lisa Williams features vampires that don't fly or turn into bats -- they can, it's just "not the done thing". They can also bite to kill or not by choice (and with practice can leave no mark at all), can see themselves in mirrors if they concentrate, and the more modern ones don't feed on humans directly. Newly created vampires are faster and stronger than other vampires, sunlight is a problem that can be got round by wearing cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, and the surest way to kill a vampire is to bury them alive (although stake-through-the-heart with optional beheading also works well).
  • One of the main characters is a half-vampire, who doesn't have any problem with sunlight and lacks most vampiric powers, but has to drink a glass of blood once a week, which he hates.
• Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun, with its inhumi feeding on human blood and requiring it to maintain their ability to reason, but without most of the qualities usually associated with vampires (though they have a few); they could be described as essentially shapeshifting, flying, reptilian leeches.
• In Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Chronicles of Saint-Germain, most of this trope is discussed in Hotel Transylvania, both the parts that are true and those that aren't.
  • Vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, but only if they are not on their native soil; consequently, they put some inside their shoes and in the foundations of any houses they own outside their native lands. (Saint-Germain's protégé laughed at this, and said she'd just thought he was wearing lifts in his shoes).
  • They can cross running water if they are protected by their native soil, but even then it makes them feel ill. If they are not protected and an attempt is made to drown them (as in A Flame in Byzantium), they do not lose consciousness or drown, but become immobilized.
  • They are not vulnerable to holy symbols; as Saint-Germain remarks, most of his kind are buried in holy ground. In The Palace, he even takes Communion.
  • They do not drink...wine. (Some variation of the statement appears in every book). They seem to feed primarily on emotion; they can feed on dreams, although that's less satisfactory than having a conscious partner. They cannot feed on any one person by drawing blood more than a half-dozen times or so without passing on vampirism.
  • They do not reflect in mirrors.
  • After they have died and risen, they can be killed by spinal injuries or decapitation (or, by extension, high explosives). If such methods are used to kill them in the first place, they will never rise.
• In Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam wampire, or "the blood" as they prefer to be called, need feed only every two or three days and only need a pint on each feeding, thus they usually keep a "court" of humans, usually of both sexes with them to avoid killing any of their food supply. Their existence is known and is legal in some countries (like Germany) and punishable by death in others (like Britain). They do not sleep and can go out in daylight as long as they avoid direct sunlight which, along with fire, can destroy them. They are immune to holy symbols but are affected by magic, including conjured light. They, like all other magical creatures in this universe, require an invitation to enter a domicile the first time.
• In Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher series, "high" vampires subsist perfectly on normal food, and drink blood only for its inebriative effect (which sometimes leads to outright alcoholism). Also, they are immune to sunlight, garlic, silver and any religious symbols, and do not produce other vampires by biting. On the other hand, they share some of the common vampire traits like being inhumanly strong and agile, not aging beyond maturity, not reflecting in mirrors, hypnotizing humans, transforming into mist and bats and being pretty hard to kill. One of them complains about having to regenerate for 50 years after being staked, decapitated and drenched in holy water. Beyond high vampires, there are all kinds of bloodsucking monsters, mostly non-sentient.
• Vampires in the Kitty Norville books have none of the really bizarre abilities or weaknesses. They are undead and need blood to remain active and to heal, and only breathe when they want to talk. They have superhuman strength and speed, but their mind control power seems like just as important an ability. They tend to be cold-blooded, as well as arrogant and melodramatic, but aren't particularly evil. Their physical strength and speed is proportional to their age, as is what happens to them when a stake is driven through their hearts: old vampires turn to dust, but new vampires leave corpses just like a human staked through the heart would. They can appear in mirrors and on film or not as they choose; it's all just tricks of the light. They burst into flames in sunlight and get very weary during the day even if they are indoors at the time. They are allergic to garlic and holy water, which leads some people to use holy water in spray bottles as weapons. It slows vampires down, and inhaling holy water will incapacitate them if they're dumb enough to breathe in just as they're sprayed, but it's generally pretty ineffective. In addition, all the weaknesses can be suppressed by magic.
• The vampires in Vampire High are surprisingly human: they eat 'human' food, have children, and can be killed by the same things that kill mortals. They can be out during the day, but need to wear sunglasses because the light hurts their eyes. They still need to drink blood, but only drink bottled blood that was donated to the Red Cross. They also dissolve in water except for a small group that can turn into 'selkies'. They appear to age at a 'human' rate, except for Dracula, who shows up at the end as the true form of the principal's dog Charon.
• Barb and JC Hendee's Noble Dead series plays with the vampiric lore, made even more interesting in that the vampires themselves don't automatically know everything there is to know about their condition. They are faster and stronger than humans, can heal injuries rapidly when they feed, and can subsist on animal blood, if they choose to. There doesn't appear to be any prevalent religion in the region, so holy symbols are probably useless. Injuring their heart won't destroy them outright, but it will weaken them significantly. Most of them are disposed of by decapitation and subsequent cremation.
• In the Night Huntress series, vampires can only be killed by shredding their hearts with a silver knife. They are inhumanly fast and strong, and only need to breathe or beat their hearts during unusual physical exertion. They can mesmerize humans with their glowing eyes, and wipe their memories or give them orders. Their blood can temporarily transfer some of their powers to humans. Their secret society has an elaborate hierarchy based on lineage from a Master vampire.
• The world of Dragaera has one known vampire, Sethra Lavode. She drinks blood, is rather pale, is undead, and is several hundred thousand years old, but other than that she's pretty normal. And she didn't become a vampire after getting bitten; the explanation given is that the Gods needed her around but she refused their offer of godhood, so they let her come back to life as an undead.
  • Loraan from Athyra might also be one, as he's similarly an undead and like Sethra, falls into some traditional vampire superstitions (namely Animals Hate Him for both of them). However, being an Evil Sorcerer, he might be intended as more like a lich.
• The vampires in Oleg Divov's Night Watcher (no relation to Night Watch above, probably) may or may not have been a result of a government experiment and reproduce through "initiation", which only works on 1% of the human population. Vampires have Super Strength, Super Speed, Super Senses and Psychic Powers, as well as Nietszchean pretensions (not necessarily unjustified). Vampires are weak against silver and die from hunger and old age (also, you could just dismember them with a goddamn axe, as one character is fond of doing; if you do it properly, they'll die just fine, it's just that it's difficult due to the whole superhuman power thing). Regular vampires drink blood to boost all their superhuman abilities to truly insane levels, are addicted to it and tend to be progressively lethargic by day to compensate for their crazy night life. They also decay in mind and body relatively quickly (first at day and then at night), eventually degenerating into what is essentially humanoid pack predators with superpowers and would die naturally within 6 years if they are not (as happens very often) killed way earlier by humans or fellow vampires. If a vampire quits blood successfully before its too late, he becomes a superhuman being that can live for up to 150 years, functions during the day just fine, has a metabolism that is twice as fast and keeps the non-blood-powered benefits (including mind powers that can now be honed properly). Those vampires nevertheless also tend to get bored with humans and have their own society.
• In The House of Night by Kristin and P.C Cast, vampyres have Power Tattoo going on, and worship the goddess Nyx. Teenagers are "fledglings" until they either go full vamp or die...and "dead" fledglings sometimes become a different, more feral version of vampyre. Our Zombies Are Different, anyone?
• The Ak'Zahar in Maggie Furey's Shadowleague trilogy are named as vampires, even though they do not change anyone (well, except perhaps into 'lunch') and are considerably more feral and inhuman than most named here. They appear to be winged humanoid creatures, perhaps reaching your waist in height, bear poisoned blades and teeth and swords and swarm like hornets. This world is sectioned off with walls separating the different races, a few individuals of which are members of the Shadowleague who patrol the stability of the walls. It was pretty dumb of the Ancients to have their country right next door to the large human-inhabited Callisiora. So when the walls started to come down... At any rate, these creatures are really too mindless to count as vampires according to most definitions of the term. Maggie Furey's vampires are wildly different.
• Tanith Lee's Vivia deals with vampires who appear to be two different types. True (for want of a better word) vampires are born as a result of sexual reproduction with a human who has been turned by the true vampire, and are as standard somewhat gargoylesque. They do however have a great deal of power and can create a perfect paradise in order to seduce their intended. Human vampires can also turn humans into vampires, although there seem to be conditions as to whether it works or not. One is described as having been too smart to rise from the dead.
• Armenian folklore tells of a vampire named Dakhanavar, who sucked blood through the soles of people's feet. He could easily be tricked by two people sharing a sleeping bag with their heads on either end, though.
• JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion mentions vampires that are simply evil, blood-drinking spirits inhabiting physical forms resembling semi-humanoid giant bats. They've never been humans, and their exact powers and weaknesses are unknown. Sauron takes the form of one to flee Luthién and Huan from the original Minas Tirith (different place from the one in The Lord of the Rings). See also Our Werewolves Are Different.
• In The Guardians, vampires are half-human half-nosferatu hybrids. They are killed by sunlight, feel Blood Lust, and are neither bound nor protected by the Rules. Vampires born from nosferatu are more powerful and less common than those born from other vampires. All vampires have reflections save one, the source of that rumor, and in his case it's caused by a completely unrelated curse.
• P. N. Elrod's vampires (in both her Revolutionary War-era and 1930s-era series) are superhumanly strong and fast, and can influence the minds of humans with direct eye contact (though it doesn't work on the insane or those who are thoroughly drunk or drugged). They can turn to mist, but not into animals. They cannot rest except in their home soil, suffering nightmares throughout their daytime "sleep" if away from their soil. They find the growing light of pre-dawn blindingly bright, and though sunlight may not harm them physically, they remain physically inert from dawn to dusk (waking refreshed with no sense of time passing if in their home soil, waking exhausted and shaken if not). Turning a human requires repeated mutual feedings--but is not guaranteed, and there's no way to know if it "took" except to wait to see if the human lover rises as a vampire after death.
  • Her Keeper Of The King trilogy, though, is different. Those vampires are naturalistic vampires, which legend says descended from a human being bitten by one of the hounds of Amwyn. They turn into a brown skinned semi-animalistic form when they vamp out. They only need to kill a human being on the first feeding after being turned. Afterword, they need only to hypnotize someone and take a small amount of blood. Sunlight will burn them, but they can go out in it if properly covered. And they aren't truly immortal. They eventually have a harder and harder time returning to human form and will become trapped in vampire form, the only cure being the drinking of water from the holy grail. They do have the Healing Factor, but must feed to stimulate it. Animal blood will suffice in a pinch, but they don't do well with it. Not all have psychic powers, Lady Sabra was an exception. They do have enhanced senses and strength.
• While H.P. Lovecraft rarely used "traditional" monsters in his works, he did have kind of vampires in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; the immortal necromancer Joseph Curwen had to spend several months after his magical resurrection as a vampire, attacking people for their blood, in order to stabilize his reformed body. The condition is temporary, however. It also mentions that one of his colleagues lives in a shunned, old castle in Transylvania.
  • The Shunned House is explicitly a vampire story, although with an unusual approach. It's a vampire with no physical manifestation, who drains its victims of their life force. Its attacks are restricted to residents of the house in which it once lived.
  • The Colour Out of Space could also be considered a vampire of sorts, albeit an extremely alien one, that sucks life-force from an area several square miles wide, but attacks individual life-forms as well with disturbing results. It appears to need the life-force to complete its breeding cycle, to multiply and leave the planet.
  • There is also The Dunwich Horror that has the half-human descendents of Yog-Sothoth sustain themselves by drinking blood of cattle and people. The story has also mention to completely inhuman things that come from outer space, and can only take a visible body by ingesting human blood, possibly as a Shout-Out to Robert Bloch's The Shambler from the Stars that features such an entity, retroactively named star vampire by the fans.
• In Robert E. Howard's The Hour of the Dragon, Conan the Barbarian meets Akivasha, an ancient princess who turned herself into a vampire with Black Magic.
• The race that the hero of C.S. Friedman's The Madness Season belongs to are not often directly referred to as vampires in the book. But immortal shapeshifters who require blood for sustenance can't really be called anything but. They lack most of the classical weaknesses and can even use our misconceptions about them to escape when their cover is blown. The hero even theorizes that the wooden stake thing was an idea spread by his own people because they're able to absorb the wood before it damages their hearts, while metal is far more lethal. Sadly, many vampires in the time that the book is set (several hundred years in the future) have become so provincial that they believe all of the legends that had been made up about them and are repelled by such mundane things as garlic and crucifixes.
• In the novel Blood Ninja, vampires are said to be descended from the gods of the night, making them kyuuketsuki. Their vampire fangs can retract into their gums a bit so they seem normal-sized, except when drinking blood, where they elongate. Vampires can be killed, but only by severing the connection between the head and the spine. They bleed normally and are never immune to weapons but have the Healing Factor being supernatural entails. Prayers or anything religious don't harm them; in fact, vampires may pray to the Buddha or whatever god they believe in. The Heart Sutra renders a vampire invisible to another when tattooed on their skin. They absolutely cannot eat normal food after being turned and must rely on blood alone. Most of them cannot walk in the sunlight but the main character and those turned by his blood can, since he apparently has the powers of the kami of the night in it and are, by tradition, faster, stronger, and have more endurance than humans - but can still be defeated by them if untrained. They look just like everyone else unless they were odd-looking even before being turned. Oh, and a good number of them are ninja.
• Harry Potter has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it example. During Slughorn's Christmas party, one of his guests is a vampire named Sanguini, who is, appropriately enough, from Romania. His behavior is played for laughs, as he constantly drifts towards a group of female students, only to be humorously snatched back by Slughorn. His appearance and mannerisms are typical (indeed, even stereotypical, right down to the red-lined black cape, starched shirt, and jet-black hair) for a "normal" vampire, though his appearance at a party on a school campus suggests that any blood thirst he has is fairly easy to control and doesn't pose a threat to the student body, not to mention being on cordial terms with the Wizarding community.
  • Vampires are also mentioned at other times throughout the series. They are considered "Beings" in terms of Ministry of Magic classification and do not have the powers of wizards. Rita Skeeter wanted them to be "stamped out," but Percy Weasley stated that this was forbidden under the terms of "paragraph twelve of the Guidelines for the Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans." Luna Lovegood also stated that her father wrote an article in which he revealed that Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour was a vampire, but was forced not to publish it.
  • They're apparently accepted enough by wizard society for sweet-shops to carry blood-flavoured lollipops just for them. Wonder why werewolves are so much worse off...
• Marcus Sedgwig has had trouble picking facts to follow in writing My Swordhand Is Singing, as he has said in his Author's Note. Recordings simply contradict one another. However, the novel proves that Vampires (in here, they are called "hostages", "vrykolakoi" or "moroii") are:
  • Super OCD (they must finish picking all dropped millet seeds before moving on). They will not leave their graves without untying all knots in a net dropped in their graves and they will not leave without writing and eventually using up all the charcoal dropped in their graves.
  • unable to cross flowing water and go out in broad daylight.
  • feeding on humans by extending their long tongues until they go through skin and eventually hit the arteries. Here, they do not bite their victims with fangs and suck out the blood.
• Appear briefly in Rivers of London where a family has been vampirised. In this Verse Vampires are poorly understood creatures. Their very presence causes death in the surrounding area (even of plantlife) as they somehow suck all life force from their surrounds, they do hunger for blood also, but it is unknown why. Vampirism is some form of infection, once one person in a family becomes a vampire everyone else quickly follows, but the vector for the transformation is unknown. They are nocturnal though, and can be destroyed by fire. Apparently there was some research by Those Wacky Nazis into using vampires as living weapons in World War II, but no one wants to talk about it as it apparently went rather wrong.
• Laurel Hamilton's Anita Blake novels offer a vampire society, partly known to the public. They (and lycanthropes) come from a common ancestor, but have since diverged into multiple "clans" with varying magical powers (many sexually oriented) and vulnerabilities. However, most are vulnerable to silver, staking, holiness, and as it turns out, necromancers like Anita. Vampires get more powerful as they age, and one of the Vampire Lords Anita meets and kills appears to be Homo erectus. New vampires are slaves to their maker (until they reach Master status), and are likely to die if their maker is killed. Humans and lycanthropes are also kept as slaves, but lycanthrope slaves are more popular for multiple reasons -- besides their being better Mooks, most vampires have one animal type they can control, including lycanthrope forms. Then too, lycanthropes are much more durable when faced with repeated blood draining.
• Harry Turtledove's The Case of The Toxic Spell Dump briefly shows a vampire, lurking and attacking like some cross between a mugger and a stray dog. The Jewish protagonist tosses a Kabbalistic amulet at it to force it into wolf form, whereupon it runs away. Two interesting comments from the narrator:
  • The Star of David is useless for this, since it's not actually a holy symbol.
  • Under better circumstances, the vampire might have been able to enthrall him while he froze in fear... but after the day he's already had, a vampire attack is an anticlimax, and in his already-stunned condition he did the right thing on autopilot.
• Octavia Butler's Fledgling takes a more scientific approach to vampires. They call themselves Ina, and really are more like parasites on humans with a mutualism relationship. They need human blood, and although they can feed on anyone, they usually have a set of people that they feed on regularly. These people are called symbionts, and they function similarly to a polyamourous relationship. Frequently the Ina also have sexual relations with their symbionts, and in fact the humans are more or less addicted to them. A major difference between this and most vampire stories is that they cannot change humans into vampires, though they can prolong their life by biting them often enough. But, the Ina do reproduce. Unfortunately, we may never know more about this interesting take on vampires, because this was Butler's final book before her death in 2006.
• The Jill Kismet books by Lilith Saintcrow have the "scurf." They are gellid feral mindless monstrousities created by a semi-psychic viral plague.
• The Heritage of Shannara series features the Drakul, a combination of vampire and siren myths. These creatures are magical mutants, having mutated to feed off blood, life, and the magic of other beings. In darkness, they are pale, gaunt, undead versions of their former selves that swarm victims to kill, and sometimes turn them; in light wraiths that beguile and tempt victims with illusions, empathic and telepathic intrusions to lure them into danger. They are immune to all conventional weapons, harmed only by magic, and seem totally animalistic, operating off need and desire alone.
• Where Dragons Only Dare! has a secret race of blue flying men that feed on fat uses the Second Punic War to confine a large stock in this cage called Rome having affluent Roman families serving them in exchange for their blood which when drunk grants great strength at the cost of mental clarity. While none can be converted through any bites those produced as a result of sex by humans under the influence possess the usual vulnerabilities with fangs modified to suck blood directly into the circulatory system.
• "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori, which was published in 1819 and started a vampire fiction craze.
  • First, the vampires are different from the traditional, more zombie-like vampires of Eastern European tradition. Polidori basically invented the seductive aristocratic vampire.
  • Second, they are different from the modern conception of fictional vampires. In particular, the idea of vampires being healed by moonlight rarely shows up in fiction (although it is present in early vampire works, particularly adaptations of "The Vampyre" and Varney the Vampire), but is central to the plot of "The Vampyre."
• In the web-novel Domina, vampires are humans modified by the toy maker to be able to see in the dark. They don't seem to be contagious, and there's no need for them to drink blood (though some of them do), but the angels still fight them, for unclear reasons.
• In Goosebumps vampires must supplement their diet of blood with daily doses of "Vampire Breath".
• The Tumbleweed Dossier: Vampires in The Tumbleweed Dossier differ greatly from those found in contemporary popular culture. Examples:
  • Vampires are able to tolerate and function in daylight as regular human beings.
  • Lycanthropy is not limited to bats, but to any creature the vampire chooses. They can also turn into fog.
  • The possess superhuman strength, but not superhuman speed.
  • They can breathe fire for some unknown reason.
  • They can only drink the blood of their own species, rendering the concept of Vegetarian Vampire impractical.
  • Someone can become a vampire in only two ways. 1) They are cursed with The Curse of the Vampire, which forbids the soul from received final judgment in Heaven, forcing it to return to its dead body, which will require the blood of the living to restore its strength and vitality. 2) Being infected with vampire venom through a bite. The latter is used with extreme caution as to not wildly increase the vampire population, which is why most victims have their veins sucked dry.
  • A vampire can only be killed by decapitation with a blade of pure silver.
  • A vampire cannot commit suicide.
• In Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga, vampires seem to be based mainly on the Riceian model. First thing to get out of the way: their skin, which seems pale in low light, actually sparkles in direct sunlight(which doesn't harm them); this leads to them spending most of their time indoors or(like the Cullens') living where the weather permits them to move more freely, such as the often-cloudy-or-overcast Pacific Northwest. Their skin is also extremely tough and resistant to damage, with only the teeth of other vampires (or "werewolves" like Jacob) able to reliably pierce it. Their hearts no longer beat and so they are perpetually cool to the touch, nor do they need to breathe or sleep. Their senses, particularly vision and hearing, are superhumanly acute to the point of being able to see individual motes of dust and hear sounds from miles away, they can move faster than the human eye can process, and have high levels of superhuman strength. They are ageless from the point of transformation, and can only be killed by burning; needless to say, crosses, garlic, etc., have no effect on them. They turn humans into vampires by biting them and releasing a fluid called "venom" into the human's bloodstream, which transforms the human tissue into vampire. The process is fairly drawn out( Bella's transformation takes a little over two days, which Carlisle notes is "very fast") and is agonizingly painful, described as feeling like being burned alive(This is most likely due to the change into literally a new species: humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, vampires have 25. The venom literally rewrites the DNA of every cell in their body.) They must drink blood for nourishment, but there is no hard-and-fast rule about how often except that a new vampire must feed much more than an older one, and they can exist on either human or animal blood. Vampires all have red eyes when they are first turned; a diet of human blood maintains this color, but animal blood results in them eventually turning yellow-gold.
  • although the vampires may in fact be a case of Did Not Do the Research seeing several old European faerie tales involve members of the Fey/ The Fair Folk that drink blood, the vampire from the Twilight Saga fit more in line with these old faerie tales
• The vampires in Robert Westall's Break of Dark short story St. Austin Friars fail to conform to, or are not shown to conform to, the great majority of standard undead bloodsucker rules. They're friends with the Bishop, have no trouble with holy ground, members of the clergy, holy symbols, sunlight or running water and they definitely don't suffer from Creative Sterility - they're more like a sort of extremely long-lived English Mafia. It's possible that the vampire part only happens after they 'die'; it's heavily implied that the reason the Drogo family are so specific in their funerary requirements is that they go on something of a rampage if not properly laid to rest in the family crypt with the appropriate Christian burials - tying in to older vampire myths that was what created vampires; improper or unshriven burial.
• From The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Scathach and Aoife of the Shadows. Rather than drinking blood, they feed off emotions.
• The vampires in George R. R. Martin's Fevre Dream are living beings, they can be seen in mirrors, holy water and silver have no effect on them, and they can't turn humans into vampires. However, they also have some of the more recognizable traits of vampires: they cannot emerge into direct sunlight or else their skin will burn, they're unnaturally strong and fast, and they can see in the dark. Finally, they also have several traits of werewolves: they need to feed on blood on a monthly basis (although it isn't tied to the moon, but instead to the amount of oxygen present in their blood) and they exhibit pack-like behavior: the most mentally strong of the group is its "bloodmaster", and he or she can command the other vampires to his or her will.
  • They are also capable of entering a state of frenzy, in which they're even more powerful. When Joshua and Damon finally battle to the death, Abner realizes Joshua isn't powerful enough to win... so he intentionally shoots Joshua with his shotgun to send him into the frenzy via pain. It works.