America's Restless Vampires

Thousands of our American ancestors were killed by vampires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1800, vampires could be blamed for nearly one-quarter of all deaths in North America and vampires remained the leading cause of death throughout the nineteenth century. This vampire did not resemble the clever Count Dracula of Bram Stoker's imagination; this vampire's cloak of invisibility was its smallness. It was so tiny that it could not be seen with the naked eye, which may explain its success as a mysterious killer. The mystery was solved in 1882, the year that Edward Koch announced his discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus. America's vampires actually were—germs!

The Great New England Vampire Panic

Two hundred years after the Salem witch trials, farmers became convinced that their relatives were returning from the grave to feed on the living

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy produced a skull.

Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests.

Except, that is, for Burial Number 4.

Das Vampir

Reading the most recent Anita Blake novel has made me ponder vampire series. Nothing is more prevalent in horror literature ­ with a few notable exceptions (King's Salem's Lot, Brite's Lost Souls, and Brust's Agyar being the most notable ones), almost every vampire novel has spawned sequels. And, perhaps in keeping with traditional vampire mythology, the sequels, like the vampiric progeny, tend to get progressively weaker, until we're left with the literary equivalent of George Hamilton in Love at First Bite.

But there are a few vampire series that, even if they peak at the first book, provide enough entertainment throughout the series to be worthwhile. These series only have two things in common ­ they have vampires as major characters, and they all contain five books or fewer. The second wasn't a rule I had when choosing the series, but it turns out that, as with almost any other series, familiarity breeds contempt, and even much more talented authors than Laurell K. Hamilton and Anne Rice (and all the authors I list are much more talented than those two) would have had trouble keeping series fresh beyond that number.