We wanted to alert you to the fact that Shelf-Life is running an online interview with Neil Gaiman about the role of contemporary vampires. We think it’s definitely worth a read.

“I think mostly what it has to do with is what vampires get to represent. Dracula was a great novel of sexual seduction, full of repeated sexual seduction and rape and sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil,” says Gaiman. “And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest. After that, I think the next big, huge, cultural, ‘somebody’s just written a vampire story’ is probably Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Steve basically wanted to do Dracula again, only in a small town in Maine. At that point you got vampires still sort of representing the ‘other.’ Then Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, which as a teenager I thought was a rather drippy book. I have to say as a teenager who loved vampire fiction and wanted vampire fiction, I thought they all sort of sat around being miserable.”

You can read the complete interview here: Neil Gaiman

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