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Popular Culture Review
the Vampire: or, The Feast o f Blood, and J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, many of
the literary vampire’s traditions and conventions are established without elabora
tion regarding how the respective tales’ vampires actually came into being. As
Clive Leatherdale notes, “The vampire of folklore,..., may have acquired its condi
tion for any one of countless reasons. The origins of its literary cousins will either
be left undisclosed, or else will result from some form of pact with the devil (55).”
Thus, for years the literary tradition found little, if any, time given over to provid
ing a convincing justification for vampirism’s existence.
The move that has taken place in recent years depicting the vampire as a pre
dominantly romantic hero (rather than a monster running counter to the natural
order) in novels by such authors as Anne Rice, Fred Saberhagen, and Chelsea
Quinn Yarbro, has seen these writers offer some attempt to address the origin of
their title characters, at least more so than their predecessors. James Craig Holte
tells us these authors’ works, “...helped establish the conventions of dark romance,
the narrative of a sympathetic, suffering vampire who represents the alienation of
postmodern men and women in a culture undergoing endless transitions (88).” In
creating the dark romance, these contemporary authors have often found it neces
sary to develop their vampire’s backstory as a way of creating audience sympathy
as well as satisfying the reader’s craving for understanding just how this mystical
state of being originated.
Bram Stoker appears to address this concern regarding the Count’s vampiric
beginnings in Dracula, but what we are really exposed to upon close examination
is either Count Dracula pontificating about his military prowess during the many
attacks on his native land or Professor Van Helsing detailing the widespread belief
in the v