I still remember reading Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice, for the very first time. I was in my dorm room, in college. I remember sitting there, spellbound, turning the pages, pouring through the book from cover to cover, only getting up once to go to the bathroom. I still remember Lestat, and Louis, and the child vampire Claudia, and the steamy city of New Orleans like a separate player in the drama. And the poor interviewer who is mesmerized by the whole erotic, gory, glorious mess. Even if you think you know the story from the movie, it is nothing like reading the book for the first time. Or again.
Other vampires have told their tales to other interviewers. A good story always needs an audience. Dracula wanted to tell his side of the story, to let people know the “truth”—to counter all the “propaganda” that Bram Stoker published for Van Helsing. So, after his true love Mina had lived her full life, on the night that she was ready to rise, Count Dracula waited out the evening with yet another poor, unsuspecting journalist with a tape recorder, pouring out the true tale of his fateful meeting with Jonathan Harker, Mina, and Dr. Van Helsing. Fred Saberhagen’s retelling of the Count’s own story makes compelling reading in The Dracula Tape.
And last, but not least, there is the mysterious vampire known as the Le Comte de Saint-Germain, who first appears in Hotel Transylvania by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and has appeared in more than two dozen books since. He rescues a woman from ruin, as he so often does, in a tale that blends history, romance, and mystery. It is fitting that this story blends fact with the paranormal, as the fictional character of Saint-Germain was based on a true historical “worker of mysteries” who appears seemingly everywhere, in a spinoff of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, a Buffyverse comics miniseries, and more than one videogame. The Comte, like Count Dracula himself, is immortal.
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