Vampires! Vampires! Vampires!

by Madelynne Ellis et al.

We're trying something new at Lust Bites today, the magic extendy post. Yep, you read that right, it starts off small and grows with stimulation! So hang on to that refresh button and don't be surprised if there's some gnashing of fangs along the way.

Vampires are such a horror (and erotica) genre staple that it's easy to forget that the modern image of the gentleman of the night only dates back a couple of centuries, to a fateful night on the banks of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.


Prior to Dr John Polidori's Byronesque "Vampyre", our fanged fiends were typically uncultured monsters, crawling around graveyards and generally making Nosferatu look like Brad Pitt.


Well today on Lust Bites (see we're even appropriately named) we're celebrating our favourite Vamps. The ladies will be along during the day to introduce you to their personal favourites. I'm expecting a certain Angel to sneak his way in there amongst the Draculas and Lestats, along with a few less obvious surprises, and of course we'd love you all to share you're own favourite vampires, be they from literature, stage or screen.

Anyway, to start us all off, I offer you my personal Vampire favourite, this is Alex (aka Julian Sands in Tale of a Vampire), doing what Vampires do best. As for why I love him, well you only have to look here and here to know that I like them bad, angst-ridden and bloody.

Janine Ashbless says: Well, watch me throw down the glove! I'm the voice of dissent today, because vampires do nothing for me. I mean - I am happy with them as predators, or as vehicles for introducing dominance and/or a little necrophilia to an erotic story; it's when the author wants to use them as characters that my eyes glaze over. Why? This is epitomised by a montage scene in Interview with a Vampire where years pass over New Orleans. In these centuries human beings with their pitiful short lives have created beautiful art and architecture, established complex societies and communities, turned swampland into a thriving city. What have the vampires, with their eternal youth and their physical superiority and their accumulated experience, achieved? Well, they've killed some people and drunk absinthe. And one of them plays the piano a bit. Boring, boring bastards.

Having said that ... I do have a soft spot (and you can guess where) for Dracula in Dracula 2000 (or Dracula 2001 in Europe because the film got there later). He's a mean predator, he's Gerard Butler and he has a backstory so clever that I smote my head and shrieked "Why didn't I think of that?!"

Olivia Knight says: Whereas I love vampires because they're supercilious, arrogant, knowing, cultured, and effeminate. It's not always what one wants in a man, but they're top of the "what I look for in a vampire" list. The blood-letting is an unfortunate side-effect for me; the eternal rage and worldweary ennui of perpetual youth is delicious. They come with the added advantage that, being nearly immortal, they probably know more than me, and being a jumped-up supercilious arrogant little know-it-all myself, I appreciate occasionally being trumped. Mostly, though, Lestat's goth-rock and intensity are what catch in my throat. (Nothing to do with the narrow planes and sharp angles of his face at all)
One more thought - the moment of blood-exchange (preferably without the actual dead-body bit afterwards), the feeling what someone else feels, gaining access to their heads - closer than sex, more heated than mind-reading, complete and perfect union: yes, please.

Portia Da Costa - me like Frank Langella as Dracula. :) Suave.Seductive.Romantic.Mass Murderer - the Count who never flashed his fangs.

Madelynne Ellis back again. Darn I couldn't resist coming back for some more. Here's a snippet from my tale, Lust for Blood, in Love on the Dark Side. Because, you know Lucius is one of my favourites.

And he advances.

Perversely, he's prettier now than he was on the edge of the dance floor. It's an ethereal, otherworldly sort of beauty, frighteningly cold, and horribly arousing. A montage of images enters my mind from somewhere outside: licking the blood from his face, smearing it across his chest, him going down on me while I bleed. I can see his tongue delving between my pussy lips, and somehow that seems horribly wrong.

There's a girl dying, right now, because of him.

My sensible self fights its way through the fog in my brain, yelling: "Run! Run! You stupid bitch." But I don't run. I'm numbed. I just shuffle backward until I hit the sinks, which dig into my back, cold and impossibly real.

"What are you doing to me? Don't come any closer!"

My fist tightens around my phone and I wish for the nineties and something a bit heavier. This slender silver shell won't cause more than a slight bruise before it snaps.

"What am I doing to you?" His voice is in my head. His eyebrow asks the question. "I'm not the one with these fantasies."

Alison Tyler says: I can’t think what my first vampire movie was. I’m sort of afraid to admit that it might have been Once Bitten! But I am definitely a fan—in fiction and film, porn and prose. Kiefer is one of my favorites, but I think that Bowie will win the prize for me this time.



By Kate Pearce
I don't really get the whole vampire visual, probably because I'm a wussy and hate the sight and smell of blood. But, I do occasionally like to read vampire romances and two series really impressed me this year from J R Ward and Lynn Viehl. They are both quite different, Ward being more like an addiction while Viehl's are more gruesome and bone cracking.


Apologies for the Amazon tags but I'm rushing a bit here!

Deanna Ashford - I just go for sexy, brooding reformed vampires like Angel and Henry Fitzroy in Blood Ties. I find the fact that they are in some way trying to atone for past actions highly compelling.

Kristina Lloyd says: OK, so I realise David Beckham isn't actually a vampire, and that he doesn't look much like one either. However, he does look like my vampire, Billy, from my novella, The Vampire's Heart. There was a moment on Lust Bites back in January when Mat posted a pic of Becks looking mean and dirty in his army gear. I fell in love, right there and then, and you all saw me do it. And you can see it again right here! I was plotting my vampire novella at the time and I'd already invented Billy - a muscled vamp, blond mohawk, army gear, yum-fucking-yum. And there was Becks on our blog, my lead vampire come to life! Months later, and the novella's about to be published - next Thursday in the UK and January 1st in the US - in a volume called Lust Bites! Ain't life strange? Next week, I'll be here with Portia and Mathilde to tell you more about the book. Did I just do Becks and a shameless plug in one paragraph? I think I peaked.

Teresa Noelle Roberts:
I have mixed feelings about vampires, I have to admit. When I think about the genre too much, I get irked. They're so damn angsty and so many of them shallow, stuck in perennial adolescence despite their great age. You're five hundred years old and hanging out in a nightclub, Mr. Vamp. What's with that?

That said, I can't help picking up vampire-themed books, even if a lot of them don't end up being keepers. What's the fascination? Well, beside the obvious fact that vampires always seem to be preternaturally attractive and often kinky, it's the notion of defeating death.

I started reading Anne Rice back in the 80s with my best friend Gregg, who was gay. I honestly don't know if the books would have fascinated us so much if we hadn't secretly wanted some sexy supernatural force to offer us an escape clause from the mortality that was bearing down on so many of our friends. (Alas, Lestat didn't appear to whisk Gregg away before AIDS did, but I've had the occasional dream in which he appears as an aimable, bookish vampire. He once told me that, gifted with eternal life, he'd spend a lot of it catching up on his reading.)

Oh, wait a minute, this was supposed to be cheerful and sexy, right? I'll throw in a vote for one of my favorite vampires being Jean-Claude from Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series. The flashy clothes and the "ma petite" get annoying, to be sure, but I love the fact that he's not, overall, filled with angst about being a vampire. He regrets things he's done in his long life, he's haunted by past experiences, but overall, he thinks being a vampire is pretty damn neat. Plus, he's a very incubus-like vampire; he gets more from the feeding if his "donor" is turned on, which sounds good to me.

Dayle Dermatis (aka 1/2 Sophie Mouette and Sarah Dale) checking in!

I don't go for angst. I don't go for brooding. But I do go for cheeky bad
boys, and that's why I love Spike: