Different Blood: The Vampire as Alien

Different blood flows in their veins — but our blood quenches their thirst.

From Bram Stoker´s 1897 creation of Count Dracula, portrayed as a foreign invader bent on the conquest of England, the literary vampire has symbolized the Other, whether his or her otherness arises from racial, ethnic, sexual, or species difference. Even before the bloodsucking Martians of H. G. Wells´ War of the Worlds, however, popular fiction contained a few vampires who were members of alien species rather than supernatural undead. Guy de Maupassant´s Horla is only one of the best-known.

The boom in vampire fiction that began in the 1970s engendered a variety of "alien" vampires, many of them portrayed as sympathetic characters. Different Blood surveys the literary vampire as alien from the mid-1800s to the 1990s, analyzing the many uses to which science fiction and fantasy authors have put this theme. Their works explore issues of species, race, ecological responsibility, gender, eroticism, xenophobia, parasitism, symbiosis, intimacy, and the bridging of differences.

An extensive bibliography guides the reader to numerous novels and short stories on the "vampire as alien" theme, many of them still in print.