Good books have bite, in fact, they bite back! The vampire in the stories and poems are characters that want to crawl out of their coffins and into your bed, hands, and head.

Do vampires exist? That’s a question you have to answer for yourself. This website is not about the Living undead. It is about the un-alive vampires of stories and poems, it is about the characters who live within the pages of books; character’s who morph freely from genre to genre, author to author, and who are freely interpreted by readers. The undead are certainly not static creatures; they change from day to day. One minute they are evil incarnate, and the next they are the consummate lover in search of a soul-mate. They are; indeed, as changeable and varied as the humans who wrote them, and whom they supposedly rose from.

What is the attraction of this enduring, undying, yet constantly changing myth? What kernel of essential need does the figure of the vampire supply? What traits and characteristics remain constant across vampire novels, vampire stories, vampire poems, and vampire films? How do we read them, create them, interpret them, and write about them?

Can we learn about ourselves as humans from analyzing the image of the bloodsucking, powerful, almost immortal vampire who appears in all cultures, societies, and times? I believe we can learn a great deal, and really enjoy the learning process when we spend time reading books featuring vampires.

Examine the vampire in novels and what do you find? You find a creature that still retains human form, although dead. It is a creature that has a truly parasitic relationship with humanity, most especially with its own family. It drinks the blood of the living to survive. It needs to be invited into ones' home. It has rigid rules to exist by. It is a creature that continues to have a life (of sorts) without the need of divine (Holy of some sort) intervention. It is usually in direct opposition with the ruling theology of whatever culture it "lives" in. And in declining numbers, within an increasingly secular world, it is depicted as either inherently evil, or as the product of an evil action. And like all evil, it usually wears an attractive face which helps the victim to forget that a vampire is first, last, and always a predator.

It is the predator which the human lovers usually describe briefly sensing before they become attached to their vampire. They describe the fear as being almost subliminal – something they are, at the back of their minds, aware they should feel. Then they set aside the fear and allow themselves to be taken. They ignore the fact that they could easily wind up deader than the undead vampire. Life being less important than the pleasure (paranormal romance here) they get from the vampire.

So what we read is a reflection of our direction as a society. Writers encode our ideas, morals, perceptions, and hidden agendas into writings since they can then wander out into the world to impact and infect other readers. We can then explore our relationships to ourselves through our relationships to vampires: things that are almost human, but not quite; almost monsters, but not quite, almost men or women, but not quite. They are malleable, changeable, undying... predators, like us.