So, for the record, the best book to read on the topic of vampires is Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (1988), by Paul Barber (I just noticed that the cover features the same tombstone from Vampires and Other Ghosts that’s been haunting me since I was a kid, huh). It’s scholarly, but readable, and as exhaustive a study of the subject of vampire folklore I’ve encountered. The second-best book I’ve read about vampires is Vampires (1981), by Bernhardt J. Hurwood.

Hurwood was an interesting character. He wrote books about monsters, of course, for both young readers and adults (this is for the latter); many of these include fictionalized versions of folktales—we’ll see more of him before the year is out. He wrote some fiction, including the novelization of Kingdom of the Spiders, and some general non-fiction, including a number of books on erotica and sex positivity. I’ll let you search for those on your own.

Anyway, Vampires is great because it is pretty casual and gives you the whole picture, the good, the bad, the serious, the scary, the folklore, the films, the camp, the heaving bosoms, the blood, the parody. It’s all in here (well, all of it up to 1981) and Hurwood delights in it. It’s very easy to fall into the horrors of the folkloric vampire and forget that there was a John Holmes Dracula porn. Vampires contain multitudes!

Additional highlights include a photograph of Jimmy Carter with the president of the Count Dracula Fan Club, a short digression into werewolves, a robust vampire filmography and interviews with “real” vampires, one of which is from New Jersey, because of course they are.

One of the strangest things: a small illustration called “Vampiric Nightmare,” credited to Max Klinger. It’s a woman asleep in bed, a typical sort of incubus scene, except the thing lying on her is a cockroach or a lobster or something combining the two. I hate it [complimentary].