VO Book List - Graphic Novels

In almost all cases, fledglings are created when a master vampire chooses a successor or 'child' and drains him or her almost to the point of death. The victim then, if possible, drinks some of the old one's blood in return. This is necessarily an act of will and trust as well as a physical exchange. One unusual characteristic is that after the transformation, the fledgling and the master can no longer psychically hear one another (see Gabrielle and Lestat, in 'The Vampire Lestat').

In San Francisco in 1998, Joshua Rudiger, 22, claimed to be a 2,000-year-old vampire and went about the city slashing the necks of vulnerable homeless people with a knife. He hurt three men and killed a woman sleeping in a doorway, and when one victim's identification led to his arrest, he claimed that he needed to drink human blood. The woman indeed died from a lack of blood.

If Dracula wrote the book on the modern vampire fiction, Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer's four Twilight books (and their five film adaptations) have given it an enormously unfaithful, enormously successful rewrite. Even before the release of Breaking Dawn--Part 2, the Twilight franchise had earned $2.5 billion dollars at the worldwide box-office, and Breaking Dawn--Part 2 is on track to make hundreds of millions more.

There is a book by Valentine Penrose which documents the life of a real and unusual character: the Countess Bathory, murderer of more than six hundred young girls. The Countess Bathory's sexual perversion and her madness are so obvious that Valentine Penrose disregards them and concentrates instead on the convulsive beauty of the character.