The Vampires Want to Wear My Mud Shoes

One of my personal traditions is that, every October, I re-read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s such a rich novel that I usually find at least one detail I’d never noticed before. This year, though, in addition to reading the actual novel, I’ve been reading a children’s version to my daughter (after all, what else can follow Frankenstein?). It’s easy to … Read More

Interview: the writers of Carmilla

  Carmilla, J. Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871 novella that predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is a seminal work of genre fiction.  It introduces the idea of the lesbian vampire, something that later writers would expand into its own genre (check out Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers for a fairly faithful, if overtly sexed-up, version).  It’s also surprisingly contemporary in its writing style.  So … Read More

The First Drop of Blood: A Dream of Dracula

It’s now possible to find gazillions of non-fiction books on Dracula, novel or historical character or cultural figure. I recommend anything by Elizabeth Miller. But in the early 70s, there was really only one:  A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead, by Leonard Wolf. It’s a long-form meditation on what vampires and Dracula mean to people in the … Read More

Ain’t No Cure: vampirism as disease

(October, the month of Halloween, conjures one name in our household: Dracula! This is the third of a series of posts on various aspects of Dracula and vampires in general. I’ll be giving away a two-pack of my own vampire novels Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood to one lucky commenter per post, so comment early, comment often!) Richard Matheson, among … Read More

Did Orson Welles make Dracula romantic?

(October, the month of Halloween, conjures one name in our household: Dracula! This is the second of a series of posts on various aspects of Dracula and vampires in general. I’ll be giving away a two-pack of my own vampire novels Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood to one lucky commenter per post, so comment early, comment … Read More

The loss of the epic vampire

(October, the month of Halloween, conjures one name in our household: Dracula! This is the first of a series of posts on various aspects of Dracula and vampires in general. I’ll be giving away a two-pack of my own vampire novels Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood to one lucky commenter per post, so comment early, comment often!) Recently I came … Read More

The return of Sir Francis Colby

For Halloween, I thought I’d tell you the story behind my latest foray in the horror genre. When I decided to write my first vampire novel, Blood Groove, I had a problem. Its name was Count Dracula. As the gold standard of vampires, his cape cast a very long shadow. Every literary vampire, from Lestat to Edward Cullen, is measured … Read More

Release day for THE GIRLS WITH GAMES OF BLOOD!

It’s release day for The Girls with Games of Blood, the follow-up to my first Memphis vampire book, Blood Groove. When Blood Groove came out last year, I of course checked at my local Barnes and Noble to see if they carried it. I was disappointed at first not to see it among the other vampire novels in the Sci … Read More

Exclusive new Memphis Vampires short story

As a thank-you to all the folks who enjoyed Blood Groove, and in anticipation of the release tomorrow of The Girls with Games of Blood, here’s the first part of a short story that takes place between the two books. You can read the whole thing on my website here. J’OUBLIE (c) 2010 Alex Bledsoe Memphis State University, late summer, … Read More