20 Best Vampire Books of All Time

Long before vampires took over our screens, they took over our bookshelves. These creatures of the night have haunted our imaginations for millennia, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that vampires as we know them today entered our literary consciousness. Though works like John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla popularized these undead bloodsuckers, no work of literature did more to define or influence vampire fiction as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In that novel, the archetypal rules were set: vampires hate garlic, transform into bats, and can be killed by a wooden stake run through the heart.

Ever since Dracula was published to massive acclaim in 1897, vampire mania has waxed and waned, but it’s never died out entirely (much like vampires themselves). After exploding across the literary canon, vampires went on to colonize film and television; now, they’re a backbone of popular culture, raking in millions of dollars across properties like True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight. But just why do we keep coming back to these violent creatures and their violent delights? The late Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice may have said it best—in an interview, she described the vampire as being “outside of life,” and thus “the greatest metaphor for the outsider in all of us.” Once depicted as the embodiment of ancient evil, now more commonly characterized as charismatic tragic heroes, vampires have indeed come to represent all sorts of outsiders, from the racial other to the queer other. In this genre, we see our own loneliness and our own monstrosity—and our own humanity, too.

Not sure where to start? We’ve rounded up the best and brightest works of vampire fiction to start your journey through the dark and spooky night. Our favorites run the gamut from seminal texts to forgotten classics to modern reinventions. Sink your fangs into all twenty of them—and don’t come crying to us if you make a bloody mess.