Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Top ten vampires in fiction and popular culture

Will Hill is a former publishing professional who lives in London. His books include Department Nineteen and The Rising.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten vampires in fiction and popular culture.

One bloodsucker on the list:
Eric Northman (The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris)

One of the endlessly compelling things about vampires is the idea of living, if not forever, for longer than any human being ever could. Eric Northman embodies this, having lived for more than a thousand years by the time he is introduced in Dead Until Dark. Born a Viking in 11th century northern Europe, he is incredibly handsome, arrogant, flirtatious, dangerous, untrustworthy and has quite literally seen it all before. Eric rules over area five of Louisiana (in Harris's books, the vampire society in the US is run as a collection of feudal states) a position that brings the series heroine Sookie Stackhouse to his attention time and again throughout the series.
Read about the other vampires on the list.

The Stackhouse family is one of Jennifer Lynn Barnes's top 10 supernatural families.

Also see: Ten vampire stories more romantic than "Twilight", Kevin Jackson's top 10 vampire novels, and Lisa Tuttle's critic's chart of top vampire books.

--Marshal Zeringue