Vampires

We were in Target last weekend when it became known that my step daughter has an interest in reading Twilight. She's an insatiable 10 year old reader and we knew this would be coming eventually.

My brother loves the stories. My step kid's dad once, long ago, told us that he'd read them and they were okay. I have never read them. While I have long been a huge fan of the horror genre (but not the gore genre, horror does not necessitate blood and guts) I have never been much for vampire stories, but what I'd heard about how the Twilight stories piss on the mythology made me want to vomit.

Jen did a little research and got some mixed signals as to whether or not her daughter would be able to handle the book so she borrowed a copy from my sister and started reading.

Her review was similar to a few I have read. It starts out terrible, then gets interesting, then gets terrible and boring. She got as far as the baseball game (really? really?) and gave up.

Oh well.

She told me a lot of what was going on and it sounds like the vampire genre gets raped without mercy. It made me think back to the few vampire novels I'd read in the past. There is 'Salem's Lot by Steven King, of course, which blends into the later Dark Tower books. Dan Simmons has written a number of novels where the bad guy was some variation on a vampire, and in one case the bad guy was actually Dracula. Was that one called Children of the Night or something like that? There was also a series by Brian Lumley that explained vampirism as a parasite. Those were pretty good, but I can't remember the name of the series to save my life.

Of course there is also Dracula by Bram Stoker. You don't have any of the others unless you have that one.

So I started to get curious about what else there might be that is worth looking at. I Googled, "top 10 vampire novels" and found a few good lists. I picked up I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (sp? Sorry) and Fevre Dream by George R R Martin. I will start into those as soon as I finish reading Stephen King's 11/22/63, which I got for Christmas and am about a third of the way though.

So my request of you, dear readers, is to make some more recommendations. I'm aware of Anne Rice and will eventually read some of her's, so I'm looking for something other than that.

What do you say, readers? Can you sell me on some vampire stories or what?

Thanks in advance!