Showing posts with label Stephanie Meyer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephanie Meyer. Show all posts

Anne Rice, Author and Screenwriter of ‘Interview With the Vampire,’ Dies at 80

Her nearly 40 novels published over a half-century sold some 135 million copies, placing her among the most popular fantasy writers of all time.

By Lisa de los Reyes for The Hollywood Reporter, December 12, 2021

Anne Rice at her home in Palm Springs, California, in 2010. She wrote like a time traveller, layering her novels with astonishingly evocative period detail. 

Fact or Fiction: Are Vampires Real?

Raise the stakes with this all encompassing guide on all things vampires.

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It's not your imagination: Vampires are everywhere. They're in vampire movies (hello, Interview with the Vampire) and all over television (we see you, The Vampire Diaries). They're the subject of countless books. (Twilight may have spawned a million vampiric copy cats, but if you want to get good and scared, try a classic: Stephen King's Salem's Lot.)

The Wild Evolution of Vampires, From Bram Stoker to Dracula Untold

As we’ve discussed here before, the tropes that define fantasy and horror literature are fluid, which is exactly why they persist. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, witches, ghosts—for several centuries, these archetypes have figured prominently in genre fiction, in no small part because they’ve adapted to suit the specific needs (and fears) of society at any given time.

The vampire in particular has had quite a colorful tenure. Vampiric creatures and spirits date at least as far back as Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece, but the vampire as we know it emerged in the early 1700s, when natives and foreigners alike began recording the folklore and superstitions of the Balkans, that cluster of eastern European countries that would become home to the most famous vampire of all time: Count Dracula.

Vampires and Biochemistry

Perhaps you are a fan of Twilight the movie or the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, or True Blood the television drama series created and produced by Alan Ball, based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris. Vampires with their frightening appearance and unusual powers and weaknesses can cause one to pause and question how this is possible. Can this mythicalogical being brought to life in Dracula, the 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula, have any basis in reality? Is there any connection to what we know about biological systems that could explain vampirism? I doubt that you would be surprised if I said yes, since this is a biochemistry course website.