Jessica Scott ([info]shadowmanhatta) wrote in [info]goodnightladies,
2006-09-14 03:41:00
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Recommended Reading

This post is brought to you by the fact that it's 3 am and I just spent the last six hours reading "New Moon" cover to cover, which is about... vampires and werewolves. There are no zombies, though. Maybe in the next book.

At any rate... what are some of the best vampire/werewolf/zombie books you've read? Or movies you've seen?

I have recently discovered the "Twilight" series, by Stephanie Meyers, which currently consists of two books: "Twilight" is just about vamps; "New Moon" has werewolves too. I found these books embarrassingly enthralling, as evidenced by the fact that I can't remember the last 600-page novel that I read in one sitting the day that I got it.

"Dracula" is obviously classic. The first three Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles books are pretty damn good too; it's only the later books that degenerate into weird vampire porn interspersed with halfhearted attempts at hysterically demented pseudo-historical storytelling.

I can't think of any books with werewolves but not vampires except for Harry Potter. :(

Zombie movies: "Shaun of the Dead," obviously, is brilliant, meaning brilliantly good. A small unknown film called "Dead Meat" takes my top rating for brilliantly bad; the premise is something along the lines of 'a mutated strain of mad cow disease causes herds of zombie cows to ravage the Irish countryside, resulting in herds of zombie people also ravaging the Irish countryside.'

Also, "Nosferatu"=Teh Creepy. Still. Primitive, but creepy. And that weird "Shadow of the Vampire" movie about making Nosferatu was creepy too, largely by virtue of having both John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe in it.

What do you recommend?

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  • 8 comments

[info]vivien529

September 14 2006, 12:45:54 UTC 5 years ago

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germaine series! There are many many books, and they are all erotic, well-researched historical novels about a 4,000-year-old vampire named, well, he has many names really, but mostly on some variation of Fransiscus St. Germaine. He is usually the hero, and not your typical vamp.

I started with Blood Games, set in Nero's Rome, and that's still one I'd recommend to begin with.

[info]bass_line_blues

September 14 2006, 20:56:02 UTC 5 years ago

I have a great fondness for Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series - alternate history set in a world based on Dracula in which Dracula not only survives, but marries Queen Victoria. The books and stories range from the late 1800s up until the present day - my favorite is Coppola's Dracula, satire about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's movie of Dracula if he'd been doing it in a universe where Dracula actually existed. (Martin Sheen becomes a vampire! So awesome.)

Then there's Robin McKinley's Sunshine, which has vampires and weres and a heroine whose greatest skill is being the Cinnamon Roll Queen before getting caught up in a vampire gang war. I just reread it, actually, because Wasteland had reminded me of it - it does a great job of playing with all the Gothic superstitions, and is in many ways fantastic.

[info]schiarire

September 14 2006, 22:47:47 UTC 5 years ago

HOW HAS NO ONE SAID CARPE JUGULUM* YET.

*by Terry Pratchett

[info]bookelfe

September 14 2006, 23:41:11 UTC 5 years ago

. . . is that not assumed taken for granted? :O

[info]bitingmybullet

September 15 2006, 00:01:52 UTC 5 years ago

*agrees so much*

[info]adiva_calandia

September 15 2006, 16:08:12 UTC 5 years ago

I like Tanya Huff's Blood books, which start with Blood Price. Blood Trail also has wers.

And I suppose I'll mention Laurell K. Hamilton, if you want violence and sex, but the only one I've read is Guilty Pleasures. I mainly think of that one because I saw a trailer for a graphic novel version of GP, with an opening line of "IN A WORLD WHERE VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES ARE LEGAL MEMBERS OF SOCIETY . . ."

[info]cheng_hu

September 16 2006, 05:59:03 UTC 5 years ago

Yup. The comic for Guilty Pleasures starts coming out in October.

[info]cheng_hu

September 16 2006, 06:02:18 UTC 5 years ago

The comic series The Walking Dead, for a gory, realistic, and fascinating soap opera of what might happen to a small group of survivors in the aftermath of a zombie plague.

And of course, the Zombie Survival Guide, for all your post apocalyptic needs.
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