In 8100 BC Egypt, the God Amunna yanked 15-yearold Miko’s soul from his body to save him from an early death. Miko is now Jebel Barkal, a vampire living in the United States of America with his vampire family. Using his mind to slip in and out of times and dimensions of space, sometimes bringing people with him, Jebel has been waging a battle against evil since the days of the pharaohs in Egypt. Now his greatest conflict will be holding on to love and life.
Life was pretty average for Andrew. Until the morning he woke up undead. First there were bite marks on his neck. Then he tried to eat garlic—but that didn’t work out so well. And now he’s got this weird urge to sleep upside down.... Andrew’s kind of excited about being a vampire. He’ll get to fly, stay up all night, and totally scare his sister. But when he meets his vampire teacher, Andy realizes that being a vampire isn’t as all it’s cracked up to be....
On my thirteenth birthday, my life changed for ever. That's when I learned the shocking truth: I'm a half-vampire. Think that sounds cool? Think again! I've been attacked by an evil vampire bat, had huge cravings for my best friend's blood, and nearly died from eating a pizza (half-vampires aren't great with garlic). Writing my secret blog is the only thing that's kept me from going completely crazy. As if life couldn't get any more complicated, there have been some vicious attacks in the local woods. Vampire-mad Tallulah (definitely not my girlfriend) thinks a super-vampire is behind them - and she's desperate to prove it, with a mysterious chain that's supposed to glow red-hot when a vampire is close by. And I have a horrible feeling that the chain's going to turn red-hot any day now . . . A new novel from award-winning author Pete Johnson that taps into the very current interest in vampires - done with Pete's humorous, accessible touch.
Twenty-three essays by young professional philosophers examine crucial ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Buffyverse (the world of Buffy). Though the show already attracted much scholarly attention, this is the first book to fully disinter the intellectual issues. Designed by Whedon as a multilevel story with most of its meanings deeply buried in heaps of heavy irony, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has replaced The X-Files as the show that explains to Americans the nature of the powerful forces of evil continually threatening to surge into our world of everyday decency and overwhelm it. In the tradition of the classic horror films Buffy the Vampire Slayer addresses ethical issues that have long fascinated audiences. This book draws out the ethical and metaphysical lessons from a pop-culture phenomenon.
Since the publication of John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), the vampire has been a mainstay of Western culture, appearing consistently in literature, art, music (notably opera), film, television, graphic novels and popular culture in general. Even before its entrance into the realm of arts and letters in the early nineteenth century, the vampire was a feared creature of Eastern European folklore and legend, rising from the grave at night to consume its living loved ones and neighbors, often converting them at the same time into fellow vampires. A major question exists within vampire scholarship: to what extent is this creature a product of European cultural forms, or is the vampire indeed a universal, perhaps even archetypal figure? In this collection of sixteen original essays, the contributors shed light on this question. One essay traces the origins of the legend to the early medieval Norse draugr, an "undead" creature who reflects the underpinnings of Dracula, the latter first appearing as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula. In addition to these investigations of the Western mythic, literary and historic traditions, other essays in this volume move outside Europe to explore vampire figures in Native American and Mesoamerican myth and ritual, as well as the existence of similar vampiric traditions in Japanese, Russian and Latin American art, theatre, literature, film, and other cultural productions. The female vampire looms large, beginning with the Sumerian goddess Lilith, including the nineteenth-century Carmilla, and moving to vampiresses in twentieth-century film, literature, and television series. Scientific explanations for vampires and werewolves constitute another section of the book, including eighteenth-century accounts of unearthing, decapitation and cremation of suspected vampires in Eastern Europe. The vampire's beauty, attainment of immortality and eternal youth are all suggested as reasons for its continued success in contemporary popular culture.
From the earliest days of oral history to the present, the vampire myth persists among mankind's deeply-rooted fears. This encyclopedia, with entries ranging from "Abchanchu" to "Zmeus," includes nearly 600 different species of historical and mythological vampires, fully described and detailed.
Prominent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.
