Sleeping with the Vampire

Comparing Dracula to contemporary YA literature, including the Blue Bloods and House of Night series, this paper traces a variety of vampiric characteristics that have survived the eras these works have crossed. These include the use of gender, the vampire’s attitude towards their victims, and how these change through the ages, as well as vampiric sexuality. As more vampire literature is written by women, the fanged fiends become very modern young women and the result loses nothing of the danger or sex appeal their nineteenth-century ancestors had. Female voices, both of authors and narrators, constitute an important shift in vampire literature that combines the old femme fatale trope with women’s independence. This paper will document this development and show that as horror brings the vampire to school the genre takes its next step to immortality that is by no means boring, creating complex vampire characters that can be heroines and demons alike.