Enjoy a Bite: 13 Great Vampire Horror Books
Vampire stories go back hundreds of years.
The vampire is one of the original horror villains. Most cultures have a vampire myth or legend in their folklore – someone, or something, essentially immortal, with an insatiable hunger for human blood.
Despite what you might think, Twilight did not kill the vampire trope.
Vampire horror is alive and thriving.
Thought there could be no new takes on the vampire story?
Think again. Horror authors are always up for a challenge and these ones have taken the vampire trope and spun it into something unique.
They’ve imaginatively blended vampires with ordinary lives, apocalypses, dystopias, mysteries, westerns, ships, wars, and history. Some of these vampires are evil, but some are just trying to survive, and, in some cases, help someone out of a predicament.
So, sit back, cover your neck, and dive into these 13 vampire horror books.
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Table of Contents
Bunker Dogs – Gage Greenwood
Post-apocalyptic vampire horror
Cassie’s night of babysitting goes to hell when bombs explode in the distance, planes fly overhead at low altitudes, and alerts on her phone tell her to seek shelter. Luckily, the boy she babysits tells her his father has a bunker in the yard.
When they make their way to this underground shelter, they soon discover they aren’t alone. Something is living in the bunker, lurking in the walls, and it’s hungry.
What started as a simple night of babysitting will descend into a psychological and claustrophobic nightmare Cassie couldn’t have prepared for.
“Don’t just fear what you’re hiding from, fear what you’re hiding with.”
No One Is Leaving – Stephen Barnard
Isolation vampire horror
A group of old friends and their partners gather in a country house for a winter weekend in Scotland. It’s been years since they’ve all been together and spirits are high. One thing they’re all excited about is meeting the newcomer; the long-time singleton in their party has finally brought a man along.
Only, he’s not what he seems.
Benjamin is not there to make friends, and between him and his partner, Hayley, they present the group with a terrifying ultimatum. No one is leaving until the conditions are met.
Should that happen, half of them will be forever changed, transformed into one of Benjamin’s kind.
The other half will be sacrificed: food to fuel the transformation.
Snowbound and scared, they’re in the fight of their lives to make it to Monday.
“When Justin had said he booked somewhere remote, he hadn’t been lying.”
The Iron Devils – Ari Marmell
Dystopian vampire horror
Born into the horrors of a post-Pacification world, Magdalena Suarez never expected much of a life. A few decades, at best, in the slave camps, until some injury or illness rendered her upkeep “no longer efficient” for her machine overseers and their rulers, the all-seeing Eyes. Day after day of drudgery and servitude and, on occasion, danger, as she and her fellow survivors went about their assigned tasks.
Except now, something has changed. Something anomalous has arisen from a lengthy slumber, something even the machines cannot comprehend. Something they, with their artificial cameras and sensors, cannot even see. Something with impossible powers, impossible strength.
Something ancient that hunts only in the dark of night.
Magdalena is about to discover a truth she never dared dream possible: Things yet exist in the world that may be more powerful even than the machines. For the first time in her life, she might have reason to hope for something more.
But is this “anomaly” truly a potential escape, or does it promise merely a new and even more horrific sort of servitude?
In the ruins of the world that was, Magdalena and the last remnants of humanity will find themselves caught in an impossible war between the mechanical and the mystical—between the unliving and the undead.
“A tremor ran through her, a scream echoed and re-echoed in her mind, in her soul.”
In the Blood – E. C. Samuels
Small town vampire horror
The sleepy English village of Crosseby is a nice place. A safe place. A place where everyone’s roots are generations’ deep. For Alf Schaeffer, it is a haven from a cruel world.
Then the newcomers arrive.
At first, Alf doesn’t understand why an attractive young couple would buy a long-abandoned plot of land, especially one whose stony soils and waist-high nettles hide the darkest chapter of Crosseby’s history.
But then people start to disappear.
At first, people panic. Disappearances don’t happen in places like Crosseby; that’s why people live there. But then the disappeared come home, and panic turns to jubilation. Only later, when the sun sets, does jubilation turn to terror.
The newcomers have brought with them an ancient evil, one that Alf and a small band of survivors must defeat before it destroys them, their town, and their country.
“Don’t open the door. Especially if it’s someone you know.”
Blood & Salt – Hubert L Mullins
Vampire horror
April 10th, 1912: Titanic sails with a dark secret in her cargo hold…
An ancient evil has been unleashed on the Ship of Dreams. One night into Titanic’s maiden voyage and passengers go missing, turn up dead, or bear a craving for blood and an aversion to the sun.
Assistant Surgeon Benjamin York only wants to help his patients, and perhaps explain this odd affliction.
Third-class passenger Fiona Lynch just wants to make it to America with her son.
Together they will unravel what’s brewing in the darkest corners of the ship. The ocean liner’s only refuge is reaching the safety of America. But with Titanic in the throes of its late-night disaster, they realize the icy water won’t be the only danger.
“The more he stared at it, the more unease he felt, and he quickly averted his eyes just before his stomach churned.”
Eternal Darkness – Tom Deady
Vampire horror
Ben Harris and his best friends Richie and Jack knew the stories about Old Man Brewster, what happened to his wife…and the flies. They had no idea why anybody would want to live there, but then they met Greg Lupescu, the new kid who had moved in. He looked strange, his father was never around, and he had this creepy butler named Karl. Soon, however, he became their close friend.
First, a young boy goes missing. Soon after, the boy’s abusive deadbeat father is slaughtered. And his grieving mother burns to death in an unnatural fire. People are dying all over Bristol, Massachusetts and the boys are beginning to realize that it all started when the Lupescus moved to town.
Ben and little sister Eve can sense that a dark storm looms on the horizon threatening to engulf Bristol, and at its center stands his new friend.
Can they all help Greg resist the sinister forces against him, or in the end will he choose to succumb and embrace an Eternal Darkness?
“What he thought he had seen had looked like a pair of glowing red eyes.”
Rovers – Richard Lange
Supernatural vampire horror
Two immortal brothers crisscross the American Southwest to elude a murderous biker gang and protect a young woman.
Summer, 1976. Jesse and his brother, Edgar, are on the road in search of victims. They’re rovers, nearly indestructible nocturnal beings who must consume human blood in order to survive. For seventy years they’ve lurked on the fringes of society, roaming from town to town, dingy motel to dingy motel, stalking the transients, addicts, and prostitutes they feed on.
The brothers encounter a young woman who disrupts their grim routine, forcing Jesse to confront his past and plunging his present into deadly chaos as he finds himself scrambling to save her life.
The story plays out through the eyes of the brothers, a grieving father searching for his son’s murderer, and a violent gang of rover bikers, coming to a shattering conclusion in Las Vegas on the eve of America’s Bicentennial.
“He hasn’t been outside during the day in more than seventy-five years.”
Bless Your Heart – Lindy Ryan
Mystery vampire horror
It’s 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with … normal business. The dead die, you bury them. End of story. That’s how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years.
Ducey’s daughter Lenore and granddaughter Grace have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter, Luna, alone.
When the town gossip’s body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it’s clear that the Strigoi – the original vampire – are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town.
As more folks in town turn up dead and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi’s return.
As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes, the dead aren’t the only things you want to keep buried.
“Rise and shine. The Evans women have some undead to kill.”
Stoker’s Manuscript – Royce Prouty
Dracula vampire horror
Romanian orphan Joseph Barkeley has a gift. Without the aid of chemical testing, he can accurately determine the authenticity and age of any document, seeing details within the fibers the way a composer picks out the individual notes of a symphony.
Rarely does Joseph get a job this delicate and well-paying: a mystery buyer has hired him to authenticate the original draft of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
When he travels to Transylvania to personally deliver the manuscript to the legendary Bran Castle, Barkeley realizes that his employer is the son of the infamous Vlad Dracula.
Imprisoned in the castle and forced to serve “the Master,” Barkeley must quickly decipher cryptic messages hidden within Stoker’s masterpiece to find the Master’s long-lost bride, or risk wearing out his welcome.
As he delves into the history of Dracula and his own lineage, Barkeley discovers that his selection for this job was based on more than his talent with rare books. Now, he has a perilous decision to make: save his life with a coward’s flight, or wage a deadly battle with an ancient foe.
“Like many events that define life’s hinges, this occurred as I sat minding my own business.”
Vampires of El Norte – Isabel Cañas
Western vampire horror
As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters. Her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.
Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago.
Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind.
When the United States invades Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros.
But the shock of their reunion, and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago, is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh.
And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.
“It was often said that a strange kind of magic ran in the waters of Rancho Los Ojuelos, the kind that made the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca go mad, the kind that made mustangs swift and the land rich.”
Dowry of Blood – S.T. Gibson
Dark fantasy vampire horror
Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king.
But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things.
Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband’s dark secrets. With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta must choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband.
But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.
“There is no horror left in this world that can surprise me.”
The Lesser Dead – Christopher Buehlman
Vampire horror
New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die.
Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody; he’s spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city’s sidewalks.
The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It’s almost too easy.
Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him … or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were.
And neither are the rest of us.
“If you’re looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn’t for you.”
Certain Dark Things – Silvia Moreno-Gracia
Vampire horror
Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive its heavily policed streets when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, is smart, beautiful, and dangerous. Domingo is mesmerized.
Atl needs to quickly escape the city, far from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Her plan doesn’t include Domingo, but little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. As the trail of corpses stretches behind her, local cops and crime bosses both start closing in.
Vampires, humans, cops, and criminals collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive? Or will the city devour them all?
“There were no vampires in Mexico City: their kind had been a no-no for the past thirty years, ever since the old Federal District became a city-state, walling itself from the rest of the country.”
Published: 23 May 2024
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