Our Vampires Are Different / Literature

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General

• 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.
• 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.

Authors

• 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 Mage 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.
• 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.
• Simon R. Green:
  • Forest Kingdom: The vampires (only seen in brief detail in the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 1) fall under the "rotting corpse that clawed out of its grave" category, right down to mold growing on the skin. They sometimes 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. Others use psychic tricks to appear like ordinary and trustworthy humans, even as they're reeking of mildew and drenched in the blood of the last poor sucker they'd fooled. They also drink blood, must stay in their coffins during daylight (which proves a fatal weakness; Hawk attacking the vampire's coffin with his axe drives it to distraction as it desperately tries to protect said coffin, putting it into position for Hawk and Fisher to kill it), are weak to garlic and hawthorn, and can only be killed by first staking them, then decapitating them, burning the head and body separately, and scattering the ashes in different places.
  • Another series of books, 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.
  • Some weird other-dimensional vampires make a brief appearance in the first Ghost Finders novel, swimming in a sea of blood called into our reality by the Big Bad. They resemble shark-mermaids, attack in an animalistic feeding frenzy, and turn on their wounded fellows as readily as on living victims.
  • 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.
    • The contrast between his Nightside vampires and the horrific ones from his other Urban Fantasy works is somewhat reconciled in "The Big Game". The comedy-vampires actually are the same rotting-corpse monstrosities as elsewhere: they've just gotten the crap kicked out of them so many times by the Greenverse's other superhuman factions that playing the chump is the only tactic left for them to survive in a world full of such threats. But give them a chance to become indestructible, and they'll gleefully try to dominate, ravage, and/or eat the world.
• Barbara Hambly's novels featuring vampires — beginning with Those Who Hunt the Night (aka Immortal Blood) — 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.
• Robert E. Howard:
  • The Hour of the Dragon, Conan the Barbarian meets Akivasha, an ancient princess who turned herself into a vampire with Black Magic.
  • "The Hills of the Dead", one of his Solomon Kane tales, features creepy unspeaking vampires that dwell in caves outside an ancient ruined city in Darkest Africa. More zombie-like than vampiric, they scratch their victims with ragged claws and press their lips on the wounds to drink; they can be destroyed with fire or a juju staff provided by Kane's Magical Negro ally. Uniquely, they only come out at night not just because they fear sunlight, but because the vultures of the savannah know dead meat when they smell it and tend to mob the creatures and peck bits off them to eat.
• Stephen King:
  • In '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 eponymous sisters pretend to be healers, use a strain of bugs for said healing... and seem to transform into these bugs upon death. They cannot leave each other for long, cannot touch religious symbols, are immune to bullets, immune to the sun, and cast no shadow.
  • Ardelia Lortz in "The Library Policeman" (Four Past Midnight) is a different kind of vampire indeed. Instead of sucking blood, she feeds on her victim's fear, which manifests itself as bloody-looking tears oozing from the corners of their eyes. Ardelia's face transforms into a cornucopia-like snout which sucks up the tears as they are expelled.
  • In the short stories Popsy and The Night Flier, (Per Word of God, it's the same vampire in both stories) the vampires are all pretty standard i.e. no reflection in mirror, superhuman strength. It is notable that the vampire in The Night Flier does appear to be captured on camera, as he is eager to destroy the camera film.
• Jiří Kulhánek: Any blood suffices and only about once per month. They don't mind sun or holy symbols or pretty much anything except silver. And there is no emo ansgt. Their enemies are "Alchemists", augmented humans that hunt and enslave vampires.
• H. P. Lovecraft works:
  • 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: its vampire is a giant that attacks through a Life Energy-draining astral projection, since its body is immobilized under several feet of earth.
  • "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.
  • "The Dunwich Horror" has the half-human progeny 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.
• Gail Z. Martin has a fondness for classical Bram Stoker-style vampires and uses versions of them in most of her fantasy novels.
  • The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: Vampires, which prefer the term talishte, are immortal and prefer, but don't require, human blood. They are incinerated instantly by exposure to sunlight and are easy to burn. Decapitation or crushing the skull also works, though a stake through the heart only immobilizes them. Vampires can compel mortals, even animals, as well as vampires of their own brood, and can read the memories of those they drink blood from, and form a telepathic bond called the kruvguldur with feed-ees whom they leave alive. The talishte notably fight on both sides in the series: Lord Penhallow and the Wraith Lord (the ghost of a vampire) want Blaine and his friends to succeed in restoring humanity's control of magic, preferring order in human civilization for self-interested reasons, while Pentreath Reese (and his creator, Thrane) wants to stop the magic from returning so that talishte can rule over humans. There's also a joint talishte-human knightly order, the Knights of Esthrane.
• Kim Newman:
  • Vampires in the 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^note Although all vampires seem to be somewhat stronger during the night, 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. Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters reveals that pretty much all Youkai are actually vampires, just vampires who have more imagination about shapeshifting than their Western counterparts.
  • In Bad Dreams the Kind are shapeshifting Emotion Eaters or souleaters who live for millennia. The more moral ones live by hanging around creative artists and feeding off their inspiration, but the more monstrous ones engage in the typical "evil Emotion Eater" habit of driving people to extremes of horror and terror before eating their minds. They aren't bothered by sunlight or holy symbols but massive physical damage of any kind can kill them. They can also be killed via mind battle but humans that strong of will only show up once or twice a millennium. As they get older they eventually enter a kind of stasis rather than actually dying.
• 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.
  • At one point Lestat meets Jesus, 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. It is explained that this is the spirit within them slowly modifying their bodies into more suitable vessels for its energy. Possibly this explains their growing resistance to sunlight.
  • Even with all the theological metaphysics that pops up in the stories, Rice nevertheless avoids Functional Magic as an explanation for anything, instead using Psychic Powers to explain the abilities of creatures like vampires, spirits and witches (also perhaps even "angels" and "God"). The physical powers of vampires are simply Mind over Matter exerted upon their own bodies, which develops with age to extend to more classic versions of this such as a telekinesis and pyrokinesis. Telepathy is also a standard vampire ability. Other abilities, such as Astral Projection, also manifest with age.
  • It's also stated that, when Akasha became the first vampire and made her husband Enkil, they had trouble to even be in the presence of candle light, much less daylight. Maharet and her twin sister Mekare explained that it was likely because the blood spirit Amel had trouble adjusting to his new corporeal existence, and their bodies were too busy keeping him contained to fight off even the weakest light. Their solution was to make more vampires, which would spread the spirit to more "hosts", easing the burden on the first vampires.
• In Raymond Smullyan's Transylvanian logic puzzles from What is the Name of This Book? and The Lady or the Tiger? And Other Logic Puzzles, humans and vampires are Knights and Knaves, with the twist that each may be either sane or insane (believing all true propositions to be false and vice versa). Insane vampires thus always tell the truth while disbelieving it.
• 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 blood types 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.

A

• 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 dilate 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.)
• Agyar: The main character is a vampire, though the word is never stated and bloodsucking is never portrayed on the page. As such, very little about vampire physiology is locked down. He seduces women to feed on them, causing them to grow increasingly weak and sluggish. He is otherwise a pretty low-key and aimless drifter. He was turned into a vampire by a female vampire and is powerless to resist her demands when she's around, causing him to avoid her at all costs.
• Almost Night features two kinds of vampires. They both have Super-Strength, Super-Speed, retractable fangs and pointed ears that they must cover up using a Glamour. They are animated by anam, or dark magic. The normal kind burn in sunlight, and die when staked through the heart. In order to turn, a vampire must drain the victim of blood and then give the victim some of its blood. Which raises questions as to how Jaspike, a ghost, was turned. After a certain spell from the Tome of Eldritch Lore, they can turn into abomination vampires with crystal flesh. Sunlight no longer burns them, but exposes their diamond skin, and their skin is too resilient to be staked in the heart. Abomination vampires can still be killed by being shot in the head, and fire makes them explode. An abomination vampire only needs to bite their victim in order to turn them, and it's a very painful process. Purposefully inhaling the burnt remains of an abomination vampire can also turn someone, though it needs to be excessive. Smoking from a pipe turned a hobo, but being around one that was cremated did not.
• "Dira" from Always Coming Home describes a creature which used its powers to enter a household under a human guise, where it ate all the food, making the humans starve nearly to death (it was stopped while two of the three people were still alive) while it literally bloated with their blood.
• 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.
• The Apprentice Adept series has vampires, but they're actually more like a were-vampire bat than the classic vampire. They're not undead, the standard vampire weaknesses don't apply, and they mostly only drink blood during mating or to retain the use of their shifting abilities (and they raise animals specifically for that purpose). Also, they can't convert non-vampires into more of their kind - that's a myth propogated by envious creatures, and might have originated from a misinterpretation of their mating ritual (when male and female vampires share one another's blood).
• 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).

B

• Bakemonogatari prominently features vampires, and their abilities hew fairly close to the Stoker template with some changes to fit them into the setting's rules about "aberrations" (supernatural beings like demons and yokai). Vampires are in fact nicknamed the "kings of aberrations" for their incredible power. They drink blood, have super strength and heightened senses, and can shapeshift. They can't swim. They're weak to sunlight and crosses, but also have a Healing Factor which is powerful enough in some vampires to overcome these weaknesses. Some less orthodox abilities include hiding in people's shadows, Mana Drain, and, of all things, Time Travel. Koyomi Araragi, the main character, spent some time as a thrall to one of the strongest vampires in history and still allows her to suck small amounts of blood on occasion, meaning he still has heightened (but not extreme) strength, senses, and healing ability.
• Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire: Vampires 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.
• Betsy the Vampire Queen: Vampires 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. Holy water makes her sneeze, Sunlight just puts her to sleep and she can not only hear but say holy names without harm and although being staked seems to kill her it really only puts her in a deathlike coma which she can be revived from by pulling it out.
• The Vampires in Black Blood Brothers suffer from all these weaknesses — well, some of them do. Different bloodlines of vampires have different weaknesses; many, for example, can walk around in daylight, but our hero can not, as it is a weakness of his bloodline. Some bloodlines need invitations to cross barriers, but others do not. While the main bad guys of the series are the Kowloon child bloodline, who kill their victims because one bite is enough to turn someone, for almost every other bloodline, humans are lining up to be bitten, as it is seen as very pleasurable (not to mention briefly giving that human vampire senses).
• Blindsight: Vampires are a predatory Human Subspecies 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; Peter Watts rationalizes each of vampires' traditional strengths and weaknesses using a scientific explanation in a PowerPoint (ostensibly from this corporation) on his website. 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 Blood & Ice by Robert Masello, vampires have existed as far back as the Crimean War, when an apparently feral creature — known to the Turks as Kalaokondjiolos — attempts to feed on Lieutenant Sinclair Copley after he is fatally wounded in the Charge of the Light Brigade, turning him into a creature like itself when he manages to drive it off with a pistol before it can kill him. Sinclair subsequently turns Eleanor Ames, a nurse he had fallen in love with, to save her from a fever. Weakened by lack of blood, they are thrown overboard while trying to take a ship back to England and are eventually found in present-day Antarctica frozen in an iceberg, only to regain consciousness and full mobility once they have been defrosted. Analysis of a blood sample from Eleanor shows that they have an inverted white-to-red blood cell count, with the subjects forced to drink blood as their own red blood cells are actively consumed, and another victim of the condition notes that he felt as though he had trouble breathing and needed to blink a lot to keep his vision clear as his blood was having trouble carrying oxygen. However, an abundance of phagocytes increases the subject's ability to cope with potential disease. A cure for the condition is discovered antifreeze glycoproteins taken from coldwater fish, with an injection of these cells essentially curing Eleanor of the need to take fresh blood as the cells supplant her body's need for red blood cells to circulate oxygen. However, this essentially turns her into a cold-blooded creature only able to survive on external sources of warmth and extremely vulnerable to any form of ice or cold liquid.
• The Blood Ladders: The elves' magically engineered genet slaves drink elf blood, the older strains like Kelu need it to survive while newer breeds like Almond only get it as a "reward" for good behavior. In turn elves drain magic from their human slaves.
• 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.
• Blood Sucking Fiends: Vampires 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 discover 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 guy's 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.
  • Moore's vampires are weak to ultraviolet in general rather than sunlight specifically, a fact which is used by Steven "Foo Dog" Wong to create anti-vampire weapons.
  • Also, vampires are weaker the further they are in generations from the original vampire, Elijah ben Sapir. Jody, turned by Elijah himself, has super speed and the strength to bench-press cars (with Elijah outclassing her in both respects) while The Animals, another three generations down, are seemingly no better than they were as humans.
• The Bone Season: The Rephaim are creatures from the Netherworld, a dimension existing between the worlds of life and death, a state it is hinted the Rephaim share. They have various Psychic Powers and feed off of the auras of Voyants, humans who also have psychic powers. They also feed off human blood in order to heal. They're eyes are normally yellow but turn orange or red when angry or feeding. They have ectoplasm instead of blood and are immune to ordinary weapons but the pollen of certain flowers, especially the amaranth, can kill them. So can wounds inflicted by other supernatural creatures and weapons dipped in ectoplasm. They can be damaged by psychic attack and by the spirits of the dead.
• Books Of Cthulhu: In the short story from Tales of the Al-Azif, "The True Name of God", the Jews of Crusades-era Acre are being preyed upon by a creature that steals their hearts from their body and eats them. The Hashishan hired to deal with them directly compare them to Eastern European strigoi.
• The Book of Dragons: In "Matriculation", vampires are of the pallid and corpse-like variety, with elongated nails and fangs. They studiously avoid sunlight, keeping their homes gloomy and unlit and only stepping outside during twilight hours and with heavy clothing. Many make their living as pawnbrokers and only take payment in blood, which they carefully and professionally extract through medical equipment.
• Book of the Short Sun: Inhumi feed on human blood and require it to maintain their ability to reason, but lack most of the qualities usually associated with vampires (though they have a few); they can be described as essentially shapeshifting, flying, reptilian leeches.
• Break of Dark: The vampires in "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.
• In Ramsey Campbell's short story "The Brood", a misanthropic veterinarian suspects a local woman living in a dilapidated house is a vampire feeding on the local homeless. He breaks into her home to confirm his discussion, and discovers he was only partially right. She's actually a type of vampire moth disguised as a human, and she's been killing in secret to feed her young, the titular brood.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers:
  • One advertises its services in Vampire For Hire, offering to take care of your problems. Its idea of doing so is to turn the person who sent for it into a vampire, and it doesn't necessarily have to feed on you to do so. And if the protagonist is anything to go by, it's not harmed by sunlight.
  • The vampires in What's a Little Fur Among Friends?, on the other hand, are blood-drinkers (and part-vampires can even feed on other part-vampires), allergic to garlic and sunlight, and can turn into bats.
• Bunnicula: Bunnicula is a vampire rabbit who sucks the juice out of vegetables. A good bit of The Celery Stalks at Midnight is spent finding vegetables he has drained and staking them with toothpicks.
• Bureau Thirteen: 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.

C

• In Spider Robinson's Callahan's 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 siphons 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.
• Carmilla, another precursor and influencer of Dracula has many similar traits. She can go about in the daylight (but appears stronger at night), has superior strength and speed, can pass through doors without opening them, and can shapeshift into a cat. Rather than being pale, she has a rosy complexion, especially after feeding. Like in The Vampyre, Carmilla seems to have some connection to the moon, as it is unnaturally bright on the night she arrives.
  • When Carmilla's tomb is opened, her body is within, showing signs of life and lying in seven inches of blood. Killing her requires a stake through the heart, decapitation, the burning of her remains, and the scattering of the ashes in a river. She never shows any fear toward holy symbols, but claims that a hymn hurts her ears. She possesses fangs, but they are apparently quite subtle as only one character even notices them, and he's got some knowledge of dentistry. Must Be Invited is somewhat implied, as on at least two occasions she engaged in elaborate scams to secure herself an invite into her victims home in order to feed on them; however she also commits several "offscreen" murders that may or may not follow the pattern.
  • Carmilla is also one of the earlier vampires to show some sympathetic traits; she regularly professes love toward the protagonist (she's the Trope Maker for Lesbian Vampire), though the epilogue states that vampires are prone to become obsessed with certain victims in a way that merely resembles love. She also seems to feel some guilt over her actions, rationalizing herself as a part of nature.
• 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.
• In The Caster Chronicles, a Blood Incubus is basically the same thing as a vampire. A normal Incubus is similar, but it feeds off dreams and emotions instead of blood. Beautiful Darkness is very unclear about what a Succubus is, aside from being a female Incubus.
• In A Certain Magical Index, their vampires aren't different. Not from normal people anyway. Presumably, we haven't met any since they're apparently in hiding, but we're informed that they're just like normal people; They love, live, laugh etc. The only thing that separates them from regular humans are their immortality, need to drink blood and unlimited magical power. Also the fact that they're immune to classical weaknesses such as crosses and sunlight. Due to their magical power, they are highly sought after by magicians such as Aureolus Izzard, whom he uses Himegame's Deep Blood ability to lure and capture one and study it's brain. Vampires are also sought after by magicians since they can use their knowledge to perform Ars Magna, which requires what amount to centuries' worth of knowledge to be molded into a chant (Since they're immortal they can store a millennia's worth of information in their brains without their bodies breaking, as such Aureolus wanted this specific property of vampires to save Index, and stop the need for erasing her memories) but when executed can bring out thoughts into the real world, essentially, making those who can accurately simulate or mold the real world would be able to control it. Aisa Himegami is rather horrified with her natural ability Deep Blood to draw them in and then simply kill them due to something about her blood.
  • Also, rather than being of the undead, they are descendants of the Biblical Cain despite the lack of in-universe evidence that could support the theory.
• The villain in The Changeover is a sort of energy vampire, though he is also referred to as a lemure, and an incubus.
• Vampires in Chicagoland Vampires can eat food (and derive great pleasure from it), they don't have to drink from living subjects, they're killed by sunlight, they're very fast, they're very strong, they can't change shape, only some of them can "glamour" people, and they live forever unless killed. Wooden stakes will kill them but a wooden bullet will also do it.
• Three kinds of vampires appear in Mercedes Lackey's Children of the Night.
  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, he 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• In Companions of the Night, Vampires can feed off human blood only, and they also have to kill on a regular basis (how frequent they must kill isn’t mentioned, but considering what Ethan says about vampires needing to keep a low profile, one assumes that it must not be enough to attract too much attention). According to Ethan, during the feeding a certain kind of mental bond as well between the vampire and the victim, that’s why feeding off animal blood or blood bags is impossible. Sunlight burns and kills them, and if they cut their hair it grows back to how long it was when they were turned over the course of a few nights.
• Cruel Illusions: Vampires are former magicians who experimented with Blood Magic and started to perform blood letting more and more in hopes of gaining the ultimate power. Eventually, these magicians pushed themselves beyond the brink of death and used up all of their magically enhanced blood, becoming immortal (the first vampires). These newly created vampires now have to feed off the blood of others in order to replenish themselves, and anyone whose blood they drain completely will rise up as a vampire themselves. They can be killed by a lot of the normal vampire killing methods found in media: a stake through the heart, weakness to sunlight, being burnt to ashes or decapitation. In addition, vampires are incapable of healing wounds inflicted by wood, as it is a natural element, so it reacts badly to the "unnatural elements" of the vampire body.

D

• Dante Valentine: The Nichtvren have several of the classic vampire traits (pale, scarily beautiful, drinks blood) and are the top dog in the supernatural creature community (their political/financial power is largely responsible for supernatural creatures getting legal rights after the Awakening). They're often accomplished mages and reproduce through blood transfer, said to be enabled by a combination of retroviral infection and etheric transfer.
• The Darkangel Trilogy: 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.
• Like vampires, the Homo lycanthropus from Darker Than You Think are vulnerable to sunlight, but only in their astral forms. It's revealed that ancient shapeshifters were buried with special weapons to keep them from rising from their graves. When Barbee's physical body is killed, his astral form is stated to be immortal, and April flat-out calls him a vampire.
• The vampires in Department 19 are people infected with The Virus and are thus biologically alive rather than The Undead. Dracula was patient zero, and he got it from a Deal with the Devil given to him by an Eldritch Abomination. Their aging doesn't stop, but it slows so much that it might as well have. They have Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Super-Senses, and can fly, some at supersonic speeds. They also get Stronger with Age because the virus keeps mutating, and vampires start out stronger if the one that turned them was particularly old. Their eyes can also turn red as an involuntary response to certain stimuli (hunger, fear, anger) or as a voluntary threat display. The virus is transmitted through plasma on the fangs. Notably, the vampire's personality is unaffected; Always Chaotic Evil is averted both because of this and because they don't need human blood, but they're always dangerous if they're hungry enough.
• In The Destroyer, 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.
• Discworld: Terry Pratchett really goes to town with this trope in his 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" of Dontgonearthe Castle (named Bela) was quite willing to give people a chance to kill him, since he could always come back to life again. Additionally, he plays into this on purpose as a sort of informal contract with the villagers: whenever he becomes too big a pain in the neck, they can dust him in any number of ways relatively easily, and so they never feel the need to make sure he stays dead.
    • Getting adapted to all those stereotypical weaknesses comes back to bite them (sorry) in the end. For example, the traditional weakness to holy symbols? The younger Magpyrs, because of their conditioning and the sheer number of gods on the Discworld, now recognize several thousand holy symbols, a fair number of which look amazingly like ordinary, everyday objects. When Granny Weatherwax comes down on them, they stop being able to resist the effects, but they don't forget all the symbols they memorized.
    • 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 (though he doesn't like to, because flying is hard work), 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. For that matter, his adherence to vampire stereotypes is also his wife's doing, including the evening dress. It's implies that she's absolutely itching for the day he finally turns her. It's also implied that he hasn't yet because he's trying to convince her the tailed jacket and vest aren't actually very important to being a vampire.
  • Discworld vampires are so diverse in their powers and vulnerabilities (it is also implied that the vampiric attitude shift varies as well — the footnotes at one point compares vampirism with diseases, in that some just make you walk funny and avoid fruit while others are incredibly virulent and deadly) 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.
    • Though, given that decapitation is the common element in these methods of dispatching, it's possible that the elaborations are just local superstition.
  • 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.
  • All Discworld vampires do have a single weakness in common: the belief that spelling their names backwards is a clever way of fooling people.
  • Salacia explains that while she cannot turn into a bat, she can turn into a large group of them, as a result of giving up human blood forcing her to obey Conservation of Mass. Her clothes also don't transform with her, while a male vampire's do; this is the Disc's narrative causality at work — female vampires are supposed to be sexy. Her sense of smell isn't nearly as sensitive as werewolf Angua's, but she can detect nearby heartbeats. And because Vampires Are Sex Gods, she always comes off as stylish and poised, even in humiliating situations like being nude and covered in mud. This last trait instinctively drives Angua nuts.
  • There's Dragon King of Arms from Feet of Clay. His obsession is with heraldry, aristocratic lineages, and pseudo-Latin puns as family mottoes. He's none to thrilled by Lady Sybil and Sam Vimes's marriage, due to a Vimes ancestor killing the last crowned king of Ankh Morpork. Ultimately, he views humans as stock to be bred as a means to an end for the sake of his obsession. He also hates that Carrot Ironfounderson, the True Heir to the Throne of Ankh, is romantically entangled with a werewolf for fear that his successor would actually be named Rex. He tries and fails to oust Vetinari while instating a puppet king, incidentally Nobby Nobbs.
  • Lastly, Lady Margolotta of Uberwald, one of the founding members of the League of Temperance. She is closely involved with The Patrician and gets no small amount of mutual Ship Tease with him. It's implied she used her clout to help him get into his position with the shared goal of cleaning up the city's criminal elements. Beyond replacing her need for blood with coffee, she also has a normal human complexion, doesn't speak with a noticeable Uberwald accent, and wears a cute, pink, formfitting sweater rather than opera clothes. She's one of the few vampire characters to appear more than once in the series, and by far the one to appear the most often.
• Domina:
  • Vampires are humans modified by the toy maker to be able to see in the dark. They aren't contagious, and there's no need for them to drink blood (though some of them do), but they are in an ongoing war with the angels. They were originally founded by Romanian immigrants who wanted to keep themselves safe by preying on the fears of others. All this really did was turn pretty much the entire city against them; the angels were founded to fight them. Over time, the vampires calmed down and just became a group of normal people who could see in the dark, but the angels kept slaughtering any vampire they saw.
  • The Nosferatu are the first subculture to get focus, and they are some of the most monstrous, preferring massive fangs, poison, and carapaces over the understated fangs most other vampires have. They're also willing to fight a civil war while under attack by zombies.
  • The Mals are vampire assassins, well-known for the old style of assassination involving slipping into a target's room and slitting their throat while they sleep. Very little of that is seen, as most of our perspective on them comes from Seena, who is a teacher for the Mal children.
  • The Canians are vampire pyromaniacs, and are considered a bit weird even by their fellow vampires, but they are helpful in a mercenary way.
  • The daevas are the vampire equivalent of the succubi. Unlike the succubi, they mostly keep to themselves, and aren't despised in the same way.
  • The Belians are vampire drug-addicts, with most of the culture consisting of mindless sclavi controlled by the (mostly) sober elite. They've been in decline ever since their leader, Bel, disappeared after some bad political choices.
• Dora Wilk's vampires has many of classic vampire tropes, with most vampires unable to walk in the sun (only most powerful ones can do it), hunger of blood bordering on sexual fascination (even if they are fine with blood from the bag), hypnotic powers, super-senses, unusual strength and speed and immortality. They are viral and a vampire's spawn forms a mental bond with its creator, although it can be given independence. Some vampires also get extra powers after turning, although this varies from person to person.
• In the short story "Down Among The Dead Men" by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, the main departure from typical vampire lore is that, other than longevity (or possibly immortality), vampires apparently have no abilities beyond those of normal humans: The antagonist is Wernecke, a vampire who lives among Jews in a Nazi concentration camp: Once the main character finds out his secret, Wernecke points out that had he any of the powers commonly attributed to vampires, he would have already used them to escape; Instead, he's slowly feeding on his fellow prisoners and trying to stay alive long enough to see the end of the holocaust. While no other vampire weaknesses are touched upon, the sharpened end of a wooden spoon apparently suffices for a stake.

• A Dowry of Blood: Vampires here are able to go out in sunlight normally and feed off blood, but do not need to take the lives of others. Vampires initially start off as weak but their blood grows more powerful as they mature, with vampires that reach 1000 years old able to sire and create new vampires.

• Dracopedia: According to Dracopedia: The Bestiary, the vampires of Gothic literature are not accurate depictions of true vampires. Rather, real vampires are hairless, dog-sized bat-like monstrosities with ten-foot wingspans whose forms are more accurately captured by gargoyle statues. Despite their size, they are powerful enough to lift off with children and small animals, while also feeding on the blood of larger creatures like cattle.
• The original Dracula created by Bram Stoker. He's something of a transitional stage between the older satanic ghoul-like vampires and the more famous "sex god" rape allegories. Sunlight reduces his powers but won't kill him, he ages backwards after feeding, he can transform into a bat, wolf, smoke, or "elemental dust", his very presence is hypnotic, he can create more vampires by feeding his victims with his own blood, creating a psychic link in the process. However, the book also said he was a sorcerer who was schooled in the devil's own version of Hogwarts so not all of his abilities were necessarily vampiric. It's also heavily implied that Dracula wasn't turned but became a vampire through dark mystical means.
  • The vampires in this story can also walk through impossibly narrow gaps, as if they became two-dimensional for the act.
  • When Dracula is in his engorged state, the animal metaphor most readily on hand is not the bat, but rather the leech. European readers would have been much more familiar with the blood-drinking prowess of the latter.
  • Apparently any weapon thrust through the heart will kill a vampire; stakes are just the most convenient thing to use when they're sleeping. Dracula himself is killed by a knife.
• In Dracula Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss, vampires evolved from a parasitic species of pterodactyl.
• 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 Dragon Waiting: Vampirism is treated as a disease, "haematophagic anemia", with parallels to AIDS and to drug addiction. Vampires have recuperatory powers far beyond normal humans; wounds, disease, drugs, poison, and aging do not trouble them. They are very strong, and do not require much sleep. Their eyes are unusually sensitive to light, but with appropriate eyewear they have no other problems getting out and about in daytime. Vampires must consume blood regularly; animal blood suffices most of the time, but the vampire must consume some human blood occasionally. If either of these is put off too long, hunger drives the vampire into a frenzy, which can only be sated by a great deal of human blood. They otherwise appear human; they eat and drink normally, and they do not have fangs. To kill a vampire, one must destroy the heart (specifically the cardiac plexus), and sever the spinal cord at the neck.
• Dreamblood Duology: Reapers are Gatherers turned rogue. They need dreamblood to survive and are able to gather it from anyone, willing or not, and en masse from hundreds of people at the same time, if needed.
• 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 described in detail.
  • Black Court: Rotting corpses, ridiculously strong and tough due to having more magic than the others, 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 or 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 Changes, the population of the Red Court seems to have been completely eliminated via Harry turning a "bloodline curse" meant for him back on the Red King and thus his "bloodline" — in other words, killing all Red Court vampires and either restoring the partially-turned or killing those who were a few hundred years old and relying on the vampire half to stay alive — that part, unknown during Changes, eventually earns Harry a powerful enemy whose beef with him is the loss of some of the Friendly Neighborhood Vampires she was close to.
  • 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, rapid healing, and superhuman speed and strength, with the latter two draining the demon's energy much more quickly. They have no traditional vampire weaknesses (including sunlight) but they are the most mortal and thus can be killed by entirely mundane means. They 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 refers to the White Court vamps as succubi on several occasions. White court vampires can not be 'created' in the traditional sense of 'infecting' others with vampirism, but instead reproduce with humans and possibly each other, but the offsprings demons are inert. The demon first starts to stir around puberty, with the child becoming a full vampire when they feed on and kill someone. Like with partially-turned Reds, once that happens, the change is irreversible. However, if the very first time they feed their victim is protected by the appropriate emotion (love, courage, or hope), then their demon will be utterly and completely destroyed before it can kill the victim, turning them into ordinary humans.
  • 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. According to a question-and-answer session held by Jim Butcher in June 2018, they rarely act outside of the Yangtze River Valley, do not deal directly with outsiders (instead moving through allies and agents), and are not signatories of the Unseelie Accords, but will act against those who don't treat them with the respect due to signatories.
  • Per Word of God, there are three more courts, for a total of seven (now six). According to the same question-and-answer session as above, they act mainly in southeast Asia (in the region of South Korea and Thailand), but aren't numerous enough to have organized Courts, instead acting as thugs who run drugs and human slaves through the local seas and sometimes hire out as assassins. They are described as being "mosquitoes" in comparison to the four (well, three now) organized vampire Courts.
  • Must Be Invited is in effect, but it applies to all magic and magical creatures, from faeries to vampires to angels and everything in between — including human magic-users. Lived-in homes have a "threshold" which either prevents crossing or weakens magical creatures that can cross it, while humans can cross freely (although they won't be able to perform any magic if they weren't invited). 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. White Court vampires are human enough to pass through uninvited, though they leave their powers at the door, while Black Courts simply can't cross, and Red Courts are paralyzed on crossing. Thresholds are also used as the anchor for wards (basically, magical countermeasures that a magic-user can cast; they can be anything from a force field to keep out certain types of creatures to "any intruder gets blown to smithereens"), which make entering a home even more dangerous for supernatural creatures (or even non-supernatural people, if the wards are created in such a way to keep them out).
  • Running water is another thing that applies to all magical beings and magic-users, coming from the way magic works: running water sort of "grounds" magic and even Harry himself once had running water used to keep him from casting while captured by an enemy. Like thresholds, this is something that would also presumably affect the Black Court a lot, the Red Court less but notably, and only limit the White Court's ability to tap into their powers.
  • Sunrises are also not great for magic, as they have a metaphysical aspect for new beginnings. However, good old sunlight, as with thresholds and running water, this sucks a lot for the Black Court, being the most undead and magic-dependent, gives the Red Court a good reason to be mostly nocturnal, and is hardly of note to the White Court.

• Dust Devils: Vampires in this book can shift into a monstrous form with ghoulish white skin, long fingers and eerie, glowing orange eyes. Their bite turns others into vampires who possess a bloodlust upon turning. They feed off blood to regenerate wounds and hence can only be permanently destroyed by being decapitated. These vampires are affected by bluebell flowers, which when if ingested, are lethal to the vampires and cause them to turn to ashes.

E

• Empire of the Vampire: Vampires within the setting largely fall into all the classic vampire tropes of a standard Gothic Horror setting. They are referred to as vampires, coldbloods or the Dead by mortals, and refer to each other as kith. Their curse is passed via bite and the draining of all blood from a victim, although it is a fickle process over which the vampire itself has no control. Depending on what state they rise in, they are classed either as highbloods, the eternally youthful and beautiful midnight aristocrats, or foubloods, also called the wretched, feral, mindless walking corpses whose only instinct is the consumption of blood. A vampire's offspring is completely subservient to their sire, and cannot in any way defy their will. Based on their age, vampires are divided into fledglings (a few years old and still somewhat human), mediae (a few decades old and only barely human) and finally the ancien (centuries to millennia old and utterly inhuman). They have the standard set of strengths (Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Super-Toughness, Super-Reflexes, Healing Factor, Hypnotic Eyes) and weaknesses (sunlight, silver, fire, decapitation, impaling, holy objects and icons, running water, dwelling thresholds etc.), as well as more unique gifts particular to the four great bloodlines to which all vampires belong. Finally, despite being technically dead they are apparently alive enough to maintain certain bodily functions, so much so as to couple with mortal women and sire Dhampyr children, known as palebloods, who inherit some of their supernatural characteristics.
• A very unusual type of vampires exist in Victor Pelevin's novel Empire V. They are an ancient alien race existing on Earth since the age of dinosaurs. The most notable thing about Pelevin's vampires is that they do not drink blood — they stopped doing it several dozens of thousands years before and instead became a race of literal Emotion Eaters who created humankind in order to feed on their emotions. They also produced the entire modern consumerist culture that makes humans chase fame and wealth thus giving vampires more feelings to eat.
• 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 Evernight series, vampires can have children (although it's extremely rare) and staking doesn’t kill them, but instead renders them unconscious. Sunlight only kills them if they haven’t fed for a while; other than that, it doesn’t really seem to bother them. While holy water only harms vampires if the priest who blessed it was truly devoted to his God or deity.

F

• 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.
• The vampires in George R. R. Martin's Fevre Dream aren't "undead", they are living beings, said to be a formerly dominant race that was supplanted by humanity. They can be seen in mirrors, holy water and silver have no effect on them, and they can't "turn" people into vampires — they reproduce sexually, just like humans. However, they also have some of the more recognizable traits of vampires: they cannot emerge into direct sunlight for more than seconds at a time or else their skin will burn (although this is a delayed reaction and only happens some hours after the fact, similar to a sunburn), they're superhumanly 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.
• 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.
• In The Fleshmarket Vampire by M.T. O'Neil, vampires can only be killed with a stake carved from tiger's eye crystal (which looks like wood from the right angle) and are vulnerable to the compound galena, which causes serious burns to any vampire that comes in direct skin contact with it. Even decapitation will not permanently kill these vampires, although they would require aid to reattach the head if such an attack occurred. These vampires are also incapable of killing their own kind, to the extent that it is extremely uncomfortable for one vampire to even think about attacking another. On a wider scale, killing a vampire will cause everyone turned by that vampire to revert to their human states, which can range from recently-turned victims returning to normal to a woman who was turned decades ago suddenly aging to physically match her chronological age of 90+, and centuries-old vampires will revert to dust. One of the novel protagonists, Mercy, a vampire who has turned against her own kind, has to train humans to fight against vampires to overcome the psychological inhibition, and it is noted that she only dealt with her sire by decapitating him and burying his head and body in random locations so that nobody could reassemble him, as she obviously couldn't kill him without killing herself in the process.
• In Fred, The Vampire Accountant, vampires are considered pretty powerful and are seen as second only to dragons in terms of strength. However, what Fred, being a Vegetarian Vampire, doesn't find out until later is that a vampire's strength and abilities are directly dependent on whom he or she is feeding. Feeding on normal humans doesn't grant any special powers. However, feeding on Parahumans can grant a vampire a variety of powers, from even greater Super-Strength to Voluntary Shapeshifting. This explains why vampire folklore varies so much across cultures. It's not that all those vampires are different. It's that they've been exhibiting different powers because of their "diet". Sunlight is still deadly, as is a stake through the heart or decapitation. Religious symbols and garlic are useless, though. Being undead, vampires are vulnerable to necromancers, although one powerful vampire is able to resist a necromancer control spell, as he himself used to be a necromancer in life and has taken steps to protect himself against such attacks. It should be noted that Fred is an atypical vampire, as the series title indicates. He's shy, introverted, and is perfectly fine with living the quiet life of a CPA, buying donor blood from a hospital administrator he knows. He even keeps wearing glasses despite no longer needing them, although the lenses in them are now fake. Making a vampire does not require consent, as Fred found out one night in an alley, when a strange figure attacked him, and he lost consciousness. He woke up with fangs and a thirst for blood and his sire nowhere in sight.

G

• By contrast, The Girl from the Miracles District, though set in the same universe as Dora Wilk Series, has wąpierze, which are vampires with their sentience and sophistication removed and replaced with overwhelming blood lust and brutality, with no extra powers and no bonds.
• In The Golgotha Series, some of the characters talk about a past encounter with a group of vampires with powerful Hypnotic Eyes. Golgotha's cemetery may also contain a vampire; if a certain grave isn't kept enclosed within a salt circle, people mysteriously begin to die of exsanguination.
• Goosebumps has a book called Vampire Breath. The titular substance is a sort of mist that the vampires breathe into a bottle when they go to sleep, as a sort of reusable Soul Jar—apparently it can be used to revive them if they get hurt, but without reabsorbing it they're significantly weaker (and have memory problems). The main characters accidentally awaken a vampire by letting most of his breath out, then have to keep the rest away from him so that he won't be able to eat them.
• The Graveyard Book: While Silas is never explicitly called the v-word or seen drinking blood, the evidence leaves little to the imagination: tall and pale and off-putting, active only at night, no reflection, flight, hypnotic abilities, neither one of the living nor the dead, sleeps in a dirt lined box "when away from home", consumes "only one food, and it was not bananas", etc.
• 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.
• In Guardians of the Night, the vampires aren't too terribly different from most versions seen before, but they do have a weakness to iron, which is generally a fae/fairy weakness.
• In Guild Hunter angels can turn humans into vampires, in exchange for a contract pledging 100 years of servitude. And if the vampires get any funny ideas about breaking the contract, they are reminded to Read the Fine Print, often forcefully. These vampires need blood, but they can stand direct sunlight and eat normal food in small amounts. They are not vulnerable to holy items (crosses, bibles, etc.). Younger vampires (under 200 years) can father mortal children with human women, but they cannot make more vampires; only angels can do that.

H

• 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.
• 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.
• 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, though no craving for blood except in their imaginations. Their teeth are completely normal, and getting bitten by them is just like getting bitten by a bog-standard human, i.e. a highly unpleasant activity that most people would like to avoid. 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 (and bothers to do so, which is a significant concern as the undead vampire is as likely as anything to be the cause of the low-blood vampire's death). Also derisively referred to as ghouls by other vampires.
  • High-blood vampires are vampires that were born already infected by the virus, their development in the womb being influenced by it. They have increased strength and speed, more so than low-blood vamps, but not as much as the undead. They also possess a craving for blood that can be akin to drug addiction, but it is not essential to their existence. They have sharp incisors like undead vampires, but human-length, and their saliva contains the same neurotransmitters in a lower concentration. 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.
• In The House of Night, vampyres have a crescent-shaped Power Tattoo on their foreheads, there's no way to predict who will become a vampyre, and worship the goddess Nyx. Then it turns out that there are two different kinds of vampyres, signaled by the presence of blue or red crescent marks, and the red ones are Undead while the blue ones aren't. Teenagers are "fledglings" until they either go full vamp or die... and "dead" fledglings sometimes become a different, more feral version of vampyre.

I

• I Am Legend is set 20 Minutes into the Future, in a world where most of the human population has 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 — 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 to draw Neville out, or traps (the only tactic shown are female vampires taking off their clothes to try to entice the sex-starved Neville out, and Ben's psychological war and his constant hiding — it's stated that Ben is far smarter than the rest of the vampires for some unknown reason). Many future vampire novels drew on the book for its inspiration. Its major film adaptations, The Ωmega Man and the eponymous 2007 film, retain the photophobia and albinism but drop the vampire conceit; The Ωmega 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.
• In The Invisible Library, Irene visits a parallel universe wherein vampires are considered normal members of society... by most people. The Lord from whom she was supposed to acquire a specific book was a vampire. Unfortunately, he was murdered during a party he hosted (with the traditional methods of staking and beheading) and the book was stolen. The fact that he was a vampire comes up so seldom in the rest of the book that one might almost forget about it. While there is a group that opposes all fantastic beings, and is suspected to have killed the vampire, they seem to be perceived as extremists by everyone else. Since the clearly evil elves are tolerated by everyone, it is not clear whether that group is actually right — in the first book of the trilogy, the protagonist does not talk to any vampires or werewolves, and it is not entirely clear whether they have to murder people for a living.
• Seraphim, Maelstrom/Yuki and Sarasvati/Kirara from Is This A Zombie? are ninjas. All they need is to occasionally suck blood; their kiss helpfully makes it painless for whoever they're feeding on. Also, being kissed by the opposite sex equals marriage. Maelstrom even uses fire as a weapon.
• "I, Vampire", by Jody Scott, is the story of a lesbian vampire who works as a dance instructor, has invented a time machine and who has now met an alien fish in Virginia Woolf's body. She only needs an ounce or so of blood once a month.

J

• In Ryk E. Spoor's Jason Wood stories, vampires have most of the standard attributes, since the stories' gimmick is Jason coming up with creative solutions to common monsters, but they have a non-standard backstory: the Curse of vampirism was created in a long-ago time as a twisted mockery of the powers and weaknesses of the priests of an Earth goddess (for instance, they drank blood freely given by volunteers as a symbol of the interconnectedness of living things, were harmed by wood because it was once-but-no-longer living, and by sunlight because being so closely aligned with the Earth strained their connection to other powers). Jason learns all this when his Friendly Neighborhood Vampire is revealed to be not a Curseborn vampire but the actual last priest of the goddess.
• The Jill Kismet books by Lilith Saintcrow have the "scurf". They are gelid feral mindless monstrosities created by a semi-psychic viral plague.
• 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.

K

• Kate Daniels: Vampires are mindless with hunger and no longer have any semblance of ego or personality. They can be piloted by necromancers, but left to their own devices they kill until there's nothing left to kill but themselves. Vampirism is caused by the Immortus pathogen.
• 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.

L

• 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 Charles Stross' The Laundry Files, vampires are created via a form of Demonic Possession whereby an extradimensional parasitic intelligence possesses a ritual magician who performs a particular algorithm in his or her head.^*In The Laundry Files, Functional Magic is really an esoteric form of higher mathematics and computer science. Doing it in your head is possible but risky, so magicians adopted electronics for most such jobs when they became available. They also have Super-Strength, can be burnt by ultraviolet light, and can't see themselves in mirrors (but can be seen in them; vampires get round the styling problem by using their phonecams). Vampires look perpetually beautiful and are able to compel mortals, both via a class three glamour which can be countered with a standard ward. Feeding on blood creates a link between the vampire's parasite and the victim, and the victim dies of something resembling mad cow disease within weeks courtesy of the parasite snacking on their brain. If they don't feed the parasite, the parasite turns on the vampire. Finally, they're immune to soul-eaters, and everybody knows they don't exist. Not actually arbitrary skepticism- in fact one vampire has put considerable effort over decades into discouraging potential vampire hunters at "the Laundry" into taking vampires' existence seriously by putting geas on the whole organization.
• 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 skeletonized 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 the Lee Nez series full-blood vampires are immortal, spontaneously combust from ultraviolet light, and don't require human blood specifically and can eat regular food. Lee was partially cured by a Navajo medicine man and is instead Long-Lived (he's aged about five years since he was turned during World War II) and can go out in the sun if he wears good sunblock. He buys cow blood from a slaughterhouse (saying it's for fertilizer) and compares it to a protein shake.
• In the far-future Legends of the Red Sun, vampirism is a venereal disease. Malum, the leader of the Bloods gang gets vampirized after a bout in a whorehouse but his sire was too strung out on drugs and alcohol, that Malum didn't get the full effect, describing himself as a half-vampire. As a half-vampire, he has the enhanced strength, speed and durability but not the weakness to sunlight. With these advantages, he proceeds to turn the rest of his gang into half-vampires just like him. Given that Malum is a staunch homophobe and the law executes homosexuals, it's not likely he vampirized his gang in the same manner as he was.
• 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 Sergey Lukyanenko's A Lord from Planet Earth trilogy, Palians are a Human Alien race who appear to be a typical vampire. There's a reason for that. Like a number of other alien races, Palians have been visiting Earth via teleportation (it's virtually impossible to perform a hyperjump to Earth due to a lack of coordinates) throughout the centuries, inadvertently creating vampire myths. They drink blood (although animal blood is fine too), have fangs, are stronger and faster than humans, tough to kill, and don't much like certain parts of our sun's spectrum). Since all Human Alien life in our galaxy, except for humanity itself, was created by humans from the future via a mix of Time Travel and Panspermia, it can be said that humans created vampires.
• In Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (1992), 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.

M

• 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 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 Monster Hunter International, any person bitten by a vampire will rise as one after death. Baby vampires are mostly mindless blood-seeking monsters (though it depends on the creator's strength). Very fast and strong with a Healing Factor, but body is no more durable than human. By drinking blood vampire gradually grows in strength, self-awareness and powers. It gains Telepathy, Hypnosis and ability to create Wights. After drinking A LOT of blood (usually takes centuries) vampire may reach Master Vampire status.
  • Stake through the heart will paralyze. Sufficiently powerful faith can turn away even a Master Vampire. Killing requires decapitation (or atomization through high explosives).
  • Master Vampires are nigh-invulnerable monsters with insane strength, insane speed and insane regeneration. Stake through the heart weakens and shuts of powers, but doesn't paralyze depending on strength. Abilities also include turning to mist, Telepathy gets a range upgrade (in tens of kilometers).
• The Mortal Instruments: Vampires are similar in many respects to classic vampires. They are often pale and thin, but this is not always the case. Their blood shimmers bright red, and when they weep their tears are made of blood. They are undead, and they are also immortal. The vampires cannot reproduce naturally, but they can turn other people into vampires.
  • The vampires are described as particularly handsome, and also have special abilities. They cannot be tracked by magic runes. Your vision is much better than that of humans. A main character named Simon needed a spectacle as a human being, but not as a vampire. In addition, vampires can also see well at night. They can also hear and smell much better than humans. They are also much stronger, faster and more resilient than humans. It is assumed that with increasing age they become more and more powerful. The vampires can also control humans, and turn into rats, bats and fog. Yet they retain their human intelligence.
  • A few vampires get the ability to walk around in the daylight instead of burning.
  • They are vulnerable to fire. Even the slightest touch can immediately set it on fire. They also ward off sacred objects, but only when they were believers as humans. Silver is also toxic to them, but will not kill a vampire.
  • The vampires often live together in clans. In any major city there should be at least one clan. Some vampires also wander around alone. All vampires see themselves as brothers and sisters, even though wars among clans are not a rarity. Sometimes shadowhunters are transformed into vampires, but these are almost always despised and avoided by other vampires. For vampires, honor and etiquette are very important. Although vampires retain their human mind after they turn undead, as Simon shows, one seldom sees those who are not evil.
• Ann Hodgman's My Babysitter Is a Vampire (1991) series:
  • Blood drinking, per usual; human or animal blood will work. Some have also been shown to eat normal human food.
  • Reproduction: Vampires can sire and birth more of their own kind, who continue to age normally until they reach a certain point (which varies depending on the individual — one was a teenager, another a young child); turning a human requires three bites. Killing the vampire responsible for the biting will reverse the transformation, even if they're fully turned (and even if the vampire isn't dead permanently).
  • Vulnerabilities: garlic, decapitation, direct sunlight (though they can survive indirect exposure; also, partially transformed victims are pained but not killed by it), the need to sleep in the soil where they were buried (which is usually kept in their coffins). The bite of another vampire is also fatal. Some have been known to die "natural" deaths, leaving skeletons that are always saved by their kinfolk; these bones can be made into teething rings that help spread the vampiric infection to human infants.
  • Other powers: Vampires have been shown turning into bats, and some have ways to resurrect themselves after being killed in some way. Some also have some variety of Psychic Powers, such as second sight.
  • It is noted that the weather can turn violent in the presence of vampires, trying to repel them from an area.
• 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:
  • 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.
• Vampires in My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister have most of the usual strengths (10-20 times the strength of a human, rapid regeneration from most injuries, transforming into various kinds of animals) and weaknesses (burning in sunlight, wooden stakes to the heart, fire, inability to cross flowing water, no reflection). However, some of these weaknesses are quite specific: wooden stakes only work if they are made of ash or hawthorn wood, and the weakness to flowing water is psychological (so water in pipes has no effect as it isn't visible, but the sound of water will affect vampires if it's realistic enough). A notable difference is that turning a human into another vampire requires a lethal amount of blood to be sucked (about 1-2 liters), which makes it difficult to create new vampires quickly. Vampires need blood to gain life force to maintain their body, but they also eat normal food. They have a strict hierarchy, with queen-class vampires exerting complete control over other vampires. Finally, they have a number of subtypes, based on the different kinds of vampires in folklore, each with its own unique abilities. These subtypes occur randomly when a vampire is created, being compared to genetic mutations.

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• Vampires in Nathaniel Keene are a mix of traditional lore and some new additions. They burn in sunlight, must be invited into buildings, can't see themselves in mirrors, can be poisoned by garlic, and subsist only on blood. However, they can't shapeshift, wooden stakes do not work on them, and they are extremely sensitive to silver (to the point where touching silver water can knock them out for a couple hours, and silver stakes are lethal).
• 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.
  • It says a lot about the series that this is just scratching the surface. In addition to the fungal spore and egg infection, vampires (called Wamphyri) can infect anyone with vampirism with even the tiniest amount of blood or... other bodily fluids. The infectee will getting glowing yellow eyes, bloodlust, above-human damage resistance, and total enslavement to the Wamphyri's will. If the newbie vamp is given enough "essence", he can spontaneously develop a slug of his own, becoming a true Wamphyri.
  • The true Wamphyri are distinguished by red eyes, conch-shaped ears (if they have them), and Body Horror powers taken Up to Eleven. A prime example of the latter is Vasagi the Suck, a vampire who shaped his mouth into a fly-like proboscis he uses to drain blood from his victims. After being horribly maimed in one novel, he reshapes himself into Vasagi the Gape, turning his entire torso into Vagina Dentata.
    • Another Wamphyri that bears mentioning is Shaitan, the father of all Wamphyri who might also be Satan. He grows so old that the vampire slug in his body outgrows him, and in his last appearance he is basically a giant version of the slug with a little of his original face remaining. His feeding methods are too horrible for the author to describe.
  • Finally, Wamphyri can spontaneously develop all sorts of psychic powers, it being that kind of universe. Human psychics who get turned into Wamphyri generally get their powers taken Up to Eleven and turned in an evil direction.
• In The Nekropolis Archives, vampires call themselves the Bloodborn. In addition to having no reflection, they cast no shadow. They are less likely to be talented in magic than humans, but have the inherent ability to transform into a "travel form", which varies from individual to individual but is generally something like a cloud of mist or a flock of bats.
• 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.
• In Neverwhere, Lamia and the other Velvet can fit to this trope, given that they drink life itself — doing this very sensually.
• 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.
• Nightfall:
  • No fear of garlic or crosses.
  • Reflections appear in mirrors.
  • The dark magic that makes vampires alive also circulates their blood (they wouldn’t bleed when wounded otherwise), and thus they are not deathly pale.
  • Also, they can consume human food and drink although it has no nutritional value for them.
  • If left without blood for days, they grow very weak, to the point when they become unable to move on their own until someone feeds them.
  • Finally, the most important difference is also a major plot point: vampires are unable to create art.
• In the Night Huntress series, vampires can only be killed by beheading or shredding their hearts with a silver knife. They are inhumanly fast and strong, and may occasionally breathe to perk themselves up if they're tired. They can mesmerize humans with their glowing eyes, and wipe their memories or give them orders. Their blood heals and can temporarily transfer some of their powers to humans. Their secret society has an elaborate hierarchy based on lineage from a Master vampire. Master vampires can fly, and some rare few gain special abilities such as telekinesis, pyrokinesis, precognition, or the ability to read human minds. There is a one-way psychic link between a vampire and its creator; the offspring can feel the sire's emotions if they're nearby.
• 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.
• In the Russian Night Watch (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, and do reflect in mirrors, even when hidden from a naked eye. Nor are they undeathly pale or cold. The only accurate part of the lore is the need for invitation before they can enter another person's dwelling (nobody knows why). Such invitation can even be renounced or withdrawn. Silver bullets and stakes slow them down, but neither is fatal — alcohol, on the other hand, has much the same effect as holy water is supposed to. 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 Dhampyrs 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.
  • According to Sixth Watch, vampires were the first Others to appear during pre-historic days (the oldest vampire alive is a Neanderthal), followed shortly by shapeshifters (the oldest shapeshifter alive is a were-sabertooth) and witches. Eventually, more types of Others "evolved", which resulted in vampires and weres being treated as the lowest Dark Others.
• The vampires in Oleg Divov's Night Watcher (no relation to Night Watch (Series) 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 nightlife. 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 it's 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.
• Charlie Manx in NOS4A2 is referred to as a vampire, but he maintains his youth by his car draining the souls of children as he kidnaps them to a semi-imaginary realm. In the process, though, the children become something much more resembling traditional vampires.

O

• Old Kingdom series: While the Dead are rather explicitly zombies, their aversion to fire, sunlight and running water, as well as the fact that they feed on Life makes them rather reminiscent of vampires instead.
• Overlord (2012): The vampiric species Shalltear is modeled after isn't a bat, but a lamprey or leech. It normally isn't obvious because she looks like a cute, eternally preteen girl. When she covers herself in blood and turns into her true form, however, she becomes an abomination from nightmares.

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• Vampires in The Parasol Protectorate (and prequel The Finishing School Series) are somewhat similar to bees. Their dwellings are referred to as hives, and they serve female vampires (queens) who possess secondary “maker” fangs necessary to convert new members. Male vampires can roam outside the hive, but can only go so far before they begin to lose their senses. A queen will leave her hive only when it is severely threatened, at which point she swarms and must quickly locate a new hive (although newly-made queens have months before they have to settle). It is possible for a male vampire to become an independent Rove, but breaking out of the hive dynamic requires an incredible act of will. Otherwise, the series plays them mostly straight: they are dead, drink blood, turn to dust in sunlight, and have an allergy to garlic. They don’t like citrus much either, but can develop a tolerance. Among hive vampires, the queen's praetoriani has the longest tether as his duty is protecting the queen.
  • In Sequel Series The Custard Protocol, the third book, Competence, deals with the crew of The Spotted Custard heading to South America following rumours of the discovery of a new kind of vampire.
• 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 explains.
• Curseborn vampires also show up in Ryk E. Spoor's Phoenix Ascendant, set in the same 'verse, along with a passing mention that there are several other types of creature not known on Earth that might be described as "vampires", with varying powers, weaknesses, and chances of being cured.
• In President's Vampire, they are functionally immortal, although they have to drink blood to stay young, and drinking human blood gives them additional powers in comparison to feeding on animals. Sun hurts them, and during daytime they are weaker. They have supernatural senses, strength and speed and have to sleep once in about a week. Garlic and silver do nothing, although religious symbols and places hurt.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Described in the fourth book. It's implied they're created though special spells and potions. Some of Bianca's great aunts "went that route with their magic." The end of the process is described:
  "drank some concoction with a name like Eternal Rest or Big Sleep, and then woke up after your heart stopped."

R

• Red Moon Rising (Moore): Pure-blood vampyres are platinum blonde, tall, attractive, highly intelligent, and have a Healing Factor known simply as regen. The only traditional weakness they retain from classic lore is sunlight, which will burn them easily and requires them to utilize Sol-Blok windows in their houses and cars. They also have the Thirst, which drives them into a bloodlust if they're around exposed blood for more than a few minutes, and bleed easily when cut. Their blood naturally lacks important nutrients and they have to replenish it by consuming more, but these days they have to stick to SynHeme, since real blood is highly addictive. Lastly, they cannot turn a human into a vampyre.
• Catherine Jinks' The 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.
• The KJ Parker story "A Rich Full Week" has an itinerant wizard protagonist dealing with supernatural matters including a more traditional/folkloric version of vampire (although the term vampire is never used, nor is any other term. In the universe of the story, the recently dead will occasionally come back with horribly swollen purple skin, and possessing super strength. There's no explanation of why this happens, although judging from the example in the story, it may involve unfinished business in life. These undead feel a compulsion to kill (usually by strangulation) any living creature that comes in reach. There's no blood drinking or spreading vampirism, although a magic that allows one to take over another person's body comes into play in the story. The undead come out at night and when the sun starts to come up, they go into a mindless state of pain and frantically rush to their graves to rebury themselves. The two ways in which to kill them for good are via beheading or by tricking them into a riddle contest and keeping them occupied until the sun comes up.
• Rifters Trilogy: In Starfish, one character, the psychologist Yves Scanlon starts to think of the Rifters as vampires after he discovers 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.
• In 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" anymore.
• Rivers of London:
  • Appear briefly in the first book 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 plant life) as they somehow suck all life force from their surroundings, 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.
  • Moon Over Soho involves a trio of women who were turned into "jazz vampires" during the Blitz, draining the lifeforce of jazz musicians to stay alive. However, due to their minds being fuzzy, they were unaware of their condition until the events of the book.
• Vampires in Rollerskater are strong and require constant feeding on blood, as is tradition. However, they are not repelled by garlic or other classic vampire-banes. They can easily be mistaken for a normal human being. They also do not have to be invited in to a building in order to enter it. Their weakness is penumbric, which damages their bodies in a similar way to the traditional depictions of sunlight and crucifixes, and a sufficiently powerful force (such as a bomb or a freight train) can obliterate their bodies. One cannot be turned into a vampire by being bitten, and vampires invariably kill their prey. Also, the transformation into a vampire is a willing one. At least, until the vampires enact a ritual to transform millions of people into vampires against their will...
• The 1936 short story "The Room of Shadows" by Arthur J. Burks has vampires who can (presumably) summon darkness, turn into a black mist, and take the form of... tiny Pekingese dogs! (And no, it's not a comedy story.)

S

• In the Sabina Kane series vampires are immortal, reproduce sexually rather than by biting humans, and they all have red hair that darkens as they age (from strawberry blond in newborns to a dark carmine color in the Dominae, the triumvirate of ancients who rule the vampire community). Humans with red hair have a trace of vampire blood. They also spontaneously combust when attacked with apple-related substances, due to (according to their mythology) being descended from a mating between the biblical Cain and Lilith, Adam's first wife in Hebrew Mythology. The vampires themselves apparently spread the popular notion that they're vulnerable to crucifixes^note Admittedly they're annoyed by crosses due to being symbols of a religion that they don't like due to the aforementioned Lilith connection. and garlic.
• The vampires in The Saga of Darren Shan are not undead monsters. They 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 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 a dying friend, and 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. After about 40 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. Also if they receive an extra dose of vampire blood, that's not enough to turn them into full vampires right away, the Purge might show up at an earlier stage.
• Barb and JC Hendee's The Saga of the 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 China Miéville'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.
• The Masan of Vadim Panov's Secret City are a magical species among others, and the source of vampire myths. The most important differences are not carrying The Virus and being long-lived, yet mortal — they reproduce as any mammal species does, going through conception, pregnancy and childbirth, then grow up, mature and potentially die from old age (although such a peaceful death is rare for a Masan). Masan are neither cross-fertile with humans nor with any other species. Masan feed on humans and would feed on most of the magical sentients, fueling their unique magic by blood; without blood a Masan goes into a hunting frenzy. They can consume regular food, but don't need to; they are affected by alcohol and possibly drugs in general. Masan will normally appear in mirrors, on film, on video devices and in observation / scan spells. To avoid technical and magical detection, Masan can turn into mist. Many blood-fueled spells are unique; original Masan artifacts work by blood magic and only for Masan wielders. Silver and garlic don't work against Masan; religious symbols and rites may work as in Secret City a part of Religion is Magic. Masan will not die from being staked, but a wooden stake through the heart paralyzes them. Sunlight hurts the Masan, prolonged exposure kills them; this works for artificial sunlight, making both sunlight lamps and sunlight spells / amulets viable options. Masan are faster and stronger than humans, in melee they are a fair match for khvans and moryanas. They were assigned as vassals to the Great House of Nav' which is responsible for keeping them within the masquerade. Nav' deploys Masan as spies, assassins and shock troops.
• From The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Scathach and Aoife of the Shadows. Rather than drinking blood, they feed off emotions.
• Serwa Boateng: The Ghanaian adze are very different from Western vampires. They most often take the form of fireflies and have the ability to possess their host's mind as well as feeding on their blood.
• Shadowleague: The Ak'Zahar are referred to 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, about waist-high to a human, 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...
• The Shadowspawn: The titular ancient subspecies of humanity combine the traits of vampires, werewolves, sorcerers, and bloodthirsty deities. They are the truth behind all the most horrible myths and legends of humanity. An updated homage to the "witch men" in Darker Than You Think, the Shadowspawn have the power to manipulate reality at the quantum level, explaining various "magical" abilities from shapeshifting to telepathy.
• 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.
• Sheep's Clothing: Vampires are Native American demons that possess corpses and feed on the blood of the living. In overall execution, they are the Bram Stoker style of vampire, and this work is one of the few modern versions to use the counting compulsion as a stalling technique.
• In Shiki, vampires can only drink up to one bowl of blood per night, are subjected to the daylight/Must Be Invited weaknesses, and are scared to, hum, undeath by religious symbols. They have some kind of Mind Control over their victims, and all of them do not transform into vampires after death. Those of the Jinrou subspecies are not affected by any of these weaknesses.
• The 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 Silver Codex the Vampires are more traditional ones when it comes to powers. However, a major point is how Vampires need to drink human blood, and why animal blood is a very bad idea.
• Skulduggery Pleasant: Vampires 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.
• So I'm a Spider, So What?:
  • Sophia's "True Ancestor" ability makes her a vampire and allows her to turn other people by biting them. She and her kin have massive boosts to their stats along with a proficiency in Charm and Blood magics. They also tend to treat humans and demons as lesser beings and are weakened in sunlight.
  • Naturally occurring vampirism is similar to a supernatural rabies. Animals and people infected with it become stronger and can feed on blood, but become mindlessly violent. While it is possible to become sane again, it is very rare. The disease is extinct in the modern day.
• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries 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, most negative. 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.
• In the Spaceforce (2012) novels, the Mixitor are an alien species who biological characteristics 'co-incidentally resemble' our Earth vampire legends. They need to ingest blood every four hours or so, or they will die in agony within forty-eight hours. They were mostly wiped out in a genocidal uprising by the Scree, their 'bloodservants', and exiled from their homeworld, and now face prejudice from the rest of the galaxy. Jez, one of the series protagonists, has become a Vegetarian Vampire, subsisting on legally manufactured blood capsules. Minty Mazata, Big Bad of the third book, not so much.
• The Shadows Spider Circus actually serve as the inspiration for vampire mythology but they're very different from their mythological counterparts. For example, they don't drink blood, they collect it and can use it to harm any children you might have.
• 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 Star Wars Legends cosmology, the ancient race called the Anzat are the galaxy's equivalent of vampires. Unlike most vampires, an Anzat is a living creature, a dangerous and Force-sensitive humanoid resembling a human with two tentacle-like proboscises that curl out and extend from their cheeks. They use these tendrils to feed not on the blood of their prey, but a special substance in the brain that they call "soup" or "luck". Most other races compare this to the victim's sensitivity to the Force, but the Anzat are such an old race — predating the Jedi and the Sith — that the Force is a new concept to them. Like true vampires, Anzat conceal themselves — they're are regarded as a myth by many, and their homeworld was unknown by most. Indeed, most legends about them are exaggerated and credited them with powers they didn't have.
• Vampires in The Strain by Guillermo del Toro are almost made specifically to counter the romanticising of the undead. Vampires in this series lose all their hair, their genitals, and grow a talon from their 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-dependent 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.
    • They become even more supernaturally based when its revealed that the ancients are pieces of an angel named Ozryel who became tempted by blood and started feeding on his kin, so he was torn apart and the weaknesses were due to gods punishments, staked to the ground unable to fly (running water), sunlight is the closest to gods face, and angel blood is silver in colour making silver hurt them)
• Vampires in Strike the Blood apparently get their powers from familiars residing inside their bodies; the stronger and more numerous those familiars are, the stronger they apparently are themselves. Sunlight doesn't kill them, though it appears to affect them to an extent (protagonist Kojou apparently feels uncomfortable under sunlight, though it doesn't seem to affect him otherwise). Their abilities include immortality, enhanced speed, strength, stamina, summoning their familiar to fight for them and (for the strongest) Healing Factor. They don't need to drink blood to survive, but getting sexually aroused will cause them to feel an intense urge to do it, and their familiars won't acknowledge them as masters as long as they haven't drunk human blood at least once per familiar; they can appear as regular humans, but their fangs will appear and their eyes turn red whenever they use their abilities or feel the need to drink blood. Being non-lethally bitten by a vampire can, but will not necessarily result in turning into a vampire yourself. There apparently are four extremely powerful vampires called "Progenitors".
• Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves push 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, succubi, sirens, sphynxes, and Pygmalion's statue.
• The young adult novel Sucks To Be Me by Kimberly Pauley is about a girl, named Mina, of all things, who must take classes on vampires to decide if she wants to be one and, at the head of each chapter, list a vampire myth and then the truth about it.
• 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").
• Vampires in Super Minion are neither undead nor human, they're actually a strain of mosquitoes that have mutated from mere parasites of humans into impostor-style predators of them. A vampire can pass in a bad light for a small mutant woman (a tempting victim for many Fortress City gangs), they're stronger and better armed than most humans, and an established hive of them can easily produce a Zerg Rush fit to bring down even a Super Hero.

T

• In Team Human, an Affectionate Parody of vampire novels, becoming a vampire has a chance of either turning you into a zombie or killing you.
• The Tentyrian Legacy vampires can have children, are immune to sunlight, have psychic powers, and can also turn certain mortals.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Vampires are a monster race and are in the top-tier of the power rankings by that general scale, and they follow an aristocracy lead by their Vampire Monarch True Demon Lord Luminous Valentine. Physically they're practically indistinguishable from humans aside from their developed canines to drink blood for life force, which they don't actually need a lot of (to the point a normal feeding doesn't kill the victim) but it is necessary to maintain their otherwise eternal lives, and older and more powerful vampires need less and less blood until it's more of a want than a need. Humans are their preferred "prey", and uniquely they get more nourishment and better taste based on the emotional state of their target at the time, with it providing the best effects when humans are happy. That's why Luminous established the human-centric Holy Empire with with herself as its "god" and her closest vampire servants as the major political figures and turned it into an ideal and prosperous civilization, thus creating the ideal feeding ground for the underground vampire nation beneath the empire that she gives strict orders to never feed too much in order to avoid disturbing the peace. Their base power-set includes Super-Strength, Super-Toughness, Super-Reflexes, a Healing Factor, Shadow movement, paralysis, charming, Voluntary Transformation, and other skills unique to specific vampires in question. Their Vampire Monarch, can outright manipulate life and death through her Ultimate Skill, allowing her to heal fatal injuries or even revive the dead within a limited scope, including herself as long as her soul is intact, while also instantly killing those weaker than her with nothing but intent. Also, they don't have weakness to crosses (Luminous flat out wears one), but their strength is weaker on nights of a new moon, they share a similar vulnerability to holy attacks as most monsters (though their Healing Factor compensates), and their hearts are a noticeable weakpoint as proven when Laplace crushed Roy Valentine's heart to kill him. Sunlight will instantly wipe a weaker vampire out, but the "overcomers" are vampires old and strong enough to walk in daylight without issue.
  • It's later revealed vampires and humans (and demi-humans) all share a common "ancestor" in the form of the "High Blood", the original progenitor that was tasked by Veldanava to populate the world with diverse life, but being immortal and with no concept of reproduction or gender, this progenitor Twilight Valentine instead experimented upon their own body and ended up creating mortal and flawed races bearing some of their traits (vampires got a weaker version of his life-force draining ability for example). Eventually, however, Twilight did succeed in creating a copy/clone/"daughter" that they then named "Luminous". Luminous later killed Twilight, becoming the sole High Blood.
• 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 Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Vampires have largely departed Fantasyland for the Horror tour. The ones that have stayed are likelier to drain people of energy than of blood.
• Trinity Blood:
  • Regular vampires are called Methuselah, the result of humans being infected by an extraterrestrial bacterium; they are living creatures, look almost totally human and at puberty develop a weakness to sunlight. They are able to breed with each other. They are naturally faster, stronger and more resilient then humans, although some humans can match them in combat with enough training. Biting humans usually results in the death of the victim. It should also be noted that they can survive off of regular food, don't really need blood and tend to develop powers; for example pyrokinesis and Prehensile Hair.
  • Then there are the Crusnik, the results of test tube babies being infected with nanomachines. They feed off the blood of the Mesthuselah (they are to vampires as vampires are to humans), have no known weakness, and at full power are basically unstoppable death machines. There are thankfully only 4 of them. Unfortunately, one of them is the Big Bad. The light novels eventually specify that even decapitation only slows down their regenerative powers; the only way to kill one for real is to extract all of the nanomachines from its body. And even then, injecting nanomachines back into them can save them if done in time. That's how Abel was saved after Cain extracted his nanomachines.
• The Tumbleweed Dossier: Vampires 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.
  • They 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 The 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, but makes them rather conspicuous); 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. Either way, when ravenous, their eyes are black.

U

• In Under a Velvet Cloak by Piers Anthony, 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.
• Unique actually shows the changing perceptions of vampires over the centuries, in the behavior of the vampires themselves. For centuries they were bandits and night horrors, sleeping wherever it was safe during the day. Then came the Renaissance and the realization that they could spend some of the treasure they'd amassed over the centuries to pay for safe buildings to sleep in, and humans to guard them... and other humans to do things, because this was the start of what would become corporate culture. After centuries of accumulating wealth with the assorted East India Companies, buying up real estate, and investing in a diversified portfolio since the start of the New York Stock Exchange, vampires have become the wealthy idle elites living it up in glamour.

V

• Vamp! plays vampires fairly straight, with the addendum that there are very few catch-all traits, and each vampire is different. Some vampires are capable of unaided Flight, while others will be very slow, even compared to humans. They are described as capable of Voluntary Shapeshifting into bats and wolves, some can breathe fire, and some have Hypnotic Eyes. However, vampires rarely do all these things. This applies to weaknesses, too, as some Cannot Cross Running Water, or have no problem with crucifixes or garlic. Even staking is said not to be 100% reliable. The only thing all vampires have in common (no mention of drinking blood) is that they are weak to sunlight, either to the point of turning to ash, or at the very least weakening them. The former seems to be the majority as well.
  • Cargilla is also naive. Vamp! has examples of literally any vampire you can imagine...including ones you normally wouldn't. Watermelon Vampires, Sentient black-hole vampires, T-Rex vampires, Megaladon Vampires, purely Liquid vampires that need sunlight to survive, just to name a few.
• 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.
• There are three species of them in Vampire Academy. The Moroi are living vampires (meaning they are born, not made) who can subsist on human food, drink blood about once or twice a day, are susceptible to sunlight, and have Elemental Powers. The Dhampir are half-Moroi, half-Dhampir (or half-Moroi, half-human; there is no discernible difference even if the human ancestry is hundreds or thousands of years back), can go out in the sunlight, do not need to drink blood at all, can't have children with their own kind, and the majority of them are badasses. The Strigoi are pretty much your traditional vampires, with pale skin, red eyes, no reflections, and are Always Chaotic Evil. They can be created from a Moroi, Dhampir, or human via the traditional blood exchange, or a Moroi may become Strigoi by drinking someone to death. Both Moroi and Strigoi have chemicals in their saliva that release endorphins in their victim's brain.
• In Vampire City, vampires sometimes glow with a sickly green light, transform their victims into things that seem like zombies/servants/gestalt extensions of themselves (which may physically resemble humans, or dogs with human faces), they will steal your hair (with tweezers) and, oh yeah, they require winding. Because they're clockwork, apparently. Written 25 years before Dracula.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Vampirocracy plays most of the Stoker-era vampire tropes straight, but adds a vulnerability to gold for an extra twist.
• In André Vianco's Vampiros do Rio Douro (aka River Douro's Vampires), seven Portuguese made a Deal with the Devil to survive a plague, becoming vampires. They have superhuman strength, speed, durability and traditional weaknesses to sunlight and are vulnerable to silver (they cannot break or bend materials made of silver and can be trapped inside silver-lined coffins), but each one of them has unique demonic powers granted by the Devil such as ice control, weather manipulation, shape-shifting, necromancy and time control. They can turn others into vampires by either biting or giving them some of their blood, though not always their "children" will inherit their special powers.
• "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".
• 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.
• In Void City, there are five different ranks of vampire: Drone, Soldier, Master, Vlad, and Emperor. Higher-ranked vampires have more powers and are harder to kill; for instance, staking a Drone through the heart will turn it to dust, but staking a Master will only paralyze it. A vampire's rank is randomly determined at the time of its creation, but once per century they can try to increase their rank through a complicated ritual involving sorcerous artifacts and making a deal with a demon.
• In V Wars, vampirism is caused by a virus that is first diagnosed as a previously-unknown strain of the flu, I1V1, called "ice flu" since the first cases were diagnosed far to the north. Before the so-called "V Event", when the knowledge of vampires became public, there were occasional cases of brutal murders, who were committed by people who claimed to be experiencing blackouts. Vampires are nearly impossible to tell apart from normal humans most of the time. It's only when they're feeding that their canines extend and their change. They also start exhibiting animalistic strength and speed, not to mention savagery. Most folklore methods of detecting or warding off vampires are bullshit. Vampires can walk at any time of day or night (although some kinds do tend to burn when exposed to sunlight), reflect in mirrors, have sex (although feeding produces a high much greater than sex), and don't care about religious symbols. The only sure way of dealing with a vampire is shooting him or her in the head or shopping the head off. There are many different types of vampires, some even straying into werewolf territory. The type appears to be determined by the person's ethnicity. The world's foremost vampire expert explains that this is due to "junk" DNA that is activated by the virus in some humans, mutating them into their ancestors' idea of a vampire. For example, jiangshi (Chinese hopping vampires) can move by, well, hopping when in vampire state, which works well in a city with lots of roofs to hop between (they also feed on life force). Russian vourdalaks can only feed on their loved ones (or anyone with whom they have a personal connection) and are one of the few types able to pass on their particular mutation to non-Russians. Native American versions have snake-like characteristics. Haitian loup garou are more like werewolves, although they shapeshift only when they wish and are not affected by the moon or outside stress factors. One story reveals that siblings do not necessarily become the same type of vampire (sex could have been a factor here, as the brother is a jiangshi, while the sister is some kind of ogre-like creature, calling herself Hsi-Hsue-Kuei). The US has the most types of vampires popping up than any other country. This is explained by the nature of the US as the "melting pot" of cultures and ethnicities.

W

• Wearing the Cape: Vampires are a common subset of Breakthrough; sometimes people are so obsessed with vampires that it shapes their powers when they break through. They have all the traditional vampire weaknesses, from sunlight to holy water, but are extremely difficult to kill without exploiting those weaknesses. Furthermore, like most other "supernatural" breakthroughs, they tend to be delusional and truly believe themselves to be a superior race of undead immortals. Because of this, vampire society is a Decadent Court on a good day. On the plus side, vampires who can create other vampires are extremely rare, with only two confirmed in the world. Jacky is the product of one such "master vampire" (and she killed him), which is why she doesn't have most of the vampire weaknesses and none of the delusions.
• 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.
• 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 victim's 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.
  • There are also the Draghkar. Humans twisted by The Dark One, which causes them to grow giant bat-like wings and mouthfuls of fangs. They can also charm people into a stupor with their voices and eyes, then “kiss” them to drain their life force.
• 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.
• In Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher series, "high" vampires subsist perfectly on normal food, and drink blood only for its inebriating 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.
  • The Video Games and expanded universe go into more detail about the other types of vampires, which include other "higher" vampire types like bruxae, which resemble human women but can change shape into monstrous humanoids who can turn invisible, and katakans, which are drawn to gold and silver and other forms of jewellery which they steal from victims. There's also "lesser" vampires like ekimmaras, which are less intelligent and more bestial, and which do feed on blood to survive and hibernate for prolonged periods.
• In John Lambshead's Wolf In Shadow vampires are actually a type of demon and the preferred name for the species is "suckers" since they do not fit most of the standard vampire stereotypes. Suckers cannot abide sunlight but do not have the other standard vampire weaknesses. A sucker cannot sire other suckers and new suckers just seem to appear in the world from time to time. While they are individually dangerous and deadly, they are not considered to pose a serious threat to humanity because they do not seem to understand the concept of loyalty and thus are rarely able to form long lasting alliances with other suckers. They also start to lose their memories as they get really old so they tend to turn senile at the peak of their power.
• In the final volume of Kameron Hurley's The Worldbreaker Saga, the reanimated Zezili becomes a vampiric plant/human hybrid, gaining mildly superhuman strength, speed and endurance, sap instead of blood, and a craving for human blood which can provide her with all the nourishment she needs. She's also a sociopathic killer, but she was just the same when she was alive, leaving it unclear if the reanimation process would have had a morally corrupting effect on a better person.

Y

• One of the supporting characters in The Year of Rogue Dragons is a vampire smoke drake left over from the Big Bad's first attempt at creating undead dragons. He doesn't feed on humans, but that's mostly because they don't have enough blood to sustain a vampire his size.

Z

• In Zora Banks, the vampires are called Vipers because they're descendants of the Garden of Eden's Serpent. They have many snake-like qualities and their fangs are more for poison than drinking. They're also, by and large, the bottom feeders of the supernatural world.

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