The five most badass vampires of all time

Renée Ahdieh is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her spare time, she likes to dance salsa and collect shoes. She is passionate about all kinds of curry, rescue dogs, and college basketball. The first few years of her life were spent in a high-rise in South Korea; consequently, Ahdieh enjoys having her head in the clouds. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and their tiny overlord of a dog.

Ahdieh's new novel is The Beautiful.

At Tor.com she shared her list of "the five most badass vampires in literature and pop culture." One bloodsucker on the list:

Maharet

I know, I know. B-b-but what about Lestat? Look, I have been a die-hard fangirl of Lestat de Lioncourt since I was a teenager. The thing is, there are so many famous dude vampires. I think it’s high time we give the ladies a moment to shine. Anyway I’m not worried Lestat will ever be forgotten. And if you ask me, Maharet is the quintessential badass vampire of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. She is the only vampire in Rice’s world who never succumbed to the madness prevalent in the “ancient ones”: the vampires that were there from the very beginning. Maharet has tracked her human family for over six millennia. She has been a pillar for them throughout the centuries, and she is one of the main reasons the vampires are able to overcome Akasha, the Queen of the Damned, when Akasha tries to take over the world midway through the series. Sorry, I should have done a spoiler alert.

But if you haven’t read Queen of the Damned, then you should get on that right away. It’s one of my absolute favorite vampire books in the world, mostly because it gets to the origin behind how vampires came to be, and the unglamorous side of living forever. Truly this book gave me first existential crisis at twelve years old, and I’m still jealous of people who get to read it for the first time.

Read about the other vampires on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue