Dust cover is long gone, but the front cover has a nifty drop of blood at the lower left corner.

This has been sitting on MT TBR for way too long -- Ready to free this book

Sending this book off to travel in MaryZee's bookish bookbox

I'm claiming this from the Biographies of Things bookbox - how could I resist? I've read a lot of vampire fiction, and some non-fiction that goes into possible reasons behind common vampire myths, but I haven't read much about real-life people who think they are - or really, really want to be - vampires...

Later: Lots of interesting stuff here, some of which I'd read before and quite a bit that was new to me. (The book did pre-date the "Twilight" craze, but even when it was written in the '80s, vampires had become pop-culture phenomena.)

The look at people who like to think of themselves as actual vampires was a bit disturbing, even though I'm pretty open-minded regarding consensual kinks {wry grin}. The author did note concerns about the reliability of the interview subjects, something that I appreciated, but even if some of the accounts are entirely fabricated, the fact that the individuals chose to come up with such a story is itself rather intriguing.

Other chapters deal with vampires in history, legend, and fiction - including a discussion of the definition of "vampire" itself, as the Bram-Stoker-inspired concept doesn't always match local legends of beings that drain blood or energy or other things. The author considers the possibility of vampire-type stories being spread as propaganda against enemies, examines the ways in which modern ('80s-modern, anyway) people had acquired their own knowledge of vampires (mainly via pop-cultural osmosis), looks into the appeal of the vampire as sex god, and touches on the unfortunate side effects of the attempts to use the real-world disease porphyria as an explanation for vampire myths - this did not go over well with a number of people who had to cope with the all-too-real symptoms of the disease. Another chapter addresses the "immortality" aspect of the vampire myth as a possible source of its popularity.

I also found the appendix interesting - the author included the questionnaires used in gathering information for the book. I have to say that some of these questions seemed to be leading the responses a bit too much for my taste, but I did appreciate the inclusion, as it allows the reader to process the information with suitable grains of salt!

[For an entertaining look at vampires, see the TV Tropes site, which has lots of vampire-themed entries.]

I left this book, bagged against the elements, on the steps of the gazebo in the Oval at around 4; hope the finder enjoys it!