Good Guys Wear Fangs

Good Guys Wear Fangs Short Story Antecedents of Angel and Company A few years ago, while watching a trailer for the then-upcoming CBS vampire series Moonlight, I began to ponder the literary roots of the heroic vampire motif. Sure, your average sci-fi fan knows about Angel and Spike, maybe has a little recall of Detective…

Where Are All the Lesbian Vampires?

Someone contacted us here and asked an interesting question–namely, where are all the lesbian vampires? In one way, this seems very nearly ridiculous. Almost to the point of whining! True Blood comes back in a couple of months, featuring a regular lesbian vampire character (Pam) who now looks to be in a relationship with another…

Best Undead on TV

Just for fun, here’s a list of excellent–some might even say “best”–vampires to be found on television. A personal list to be sure, but offered with sincerity. Your own views most welcome as well! Buffy the Vampire Slayer has so many great vampire characters I force myself to just choose two–the Sid Vicious and Nancy…

Tropes That Need to Go Away

One problem any popular genre develops tends to be tropes that pervade too much of it all. In and of themselves, maybe they work. Often they work quite well. They can, anyway. But when we see the same thing over and over and over again, we enter into the realm of the cliche. So here’s…

Forever Knight Re-Imagined

Consider the ongoing popularity of shows like The Vampire Diaries as well as True Blood.  Now consider also such re-imaginings of staples such as BBC’s Sherlock as well as the two Guy Ritchie films.   Now imagine if you will a rebooting, a retelling of a cult favorite that our readers might well find attractive–and so…

Search For a Cure

Way back in the 1840s, the penny dreadful (rightfully named–each chapter cost a penny and most had all the literary merit of an insurance company’s internal memo) Varney The Vampyre introduced a brand new idea in vampire fiction.  Given the youth of the genre, that doesn’t sound quite so impressive.  On the other hand, it…

Vampires – An Avatar of Sin

When vampires first drifted, shadow-like, into popular literature in the early 1800s, this denizen of ancient folklore became an incarnation of the Nightmare Stranger–the alien ‘other’ who presented a threat to civilization itself. It was death reaching out to infect the living. The foreigner who defiled virtuous women. A pagan invader thriving where the light…

Crossovers

Cliche it may be, but who can doubt the internet created a whole new venue for amateur writers to put their work out there? In other words, the world-wide web proved a godsend for fan fiction. Or maybe from the other end of metaphysical spectrum, depending upon one’s view of the topic! Contrary to popular…

Gumshoes of the Night

Detective fiction, according to some, is dying. At least on the printed page, as readers increasingly demand only one type of such story (Police Procedural, Locked Door, etc.) and refuse to glance at any others. Maybe. But in terms of other media, the detective genre remains alive and kicking. Sometimes, undead and kicking. “Forever Knight”…

Why Lesbian Vampires?

For all practical purposes, the trope Vampire Lesbian emerged with Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s novella “Carmilla.” Eventually, with the rise of a new medium–motion pictures–an adaptation of that story appeared. “Crypt of the Vampire” became one of the still-relatively few such. The trope, however, could be seen in “Dracula’s Daughter” as well as the eerie “Vampyr.”…