Reading List
Grady Hendrix
Novelist and Screenwriter
Grady Hendrix writes horror that is funny without letting the horror off the hook. Horrorstor is a haunted-house novel set in a store much like IKEA; The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires puts a suburban reading group up against something worse than a bad novel. He also wrote Paperbacks from Hell, an affectionate history of the 1970s and 1980s horror paperback boom, and helped found the New York Asian Film Festival.
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The Gilda Stories
by Jewelle Gomez
“This is a book with such a breadth of imagination that really shows you what can be done with vampires. For every heterosexual vampire novel — a broody male vampire transformed by the love of a young woman — you have something like John Peyton Cooke’s Out For Blood, which is a gay vampire story from the ’90s, or The Gilda Stories, which are gay non-white vampire stories… In 1991, it was very ahead of its time.” — via Interview, April 2025
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Black Ambrosia
by Elizabeth Engstrom
“But there was a darker side of America, of the Rust Belt, where the Midwest and these industrial towns were getting hollowed out. And all over the Midwest, there were unsolved crimes – the Ohio Circleville letter writer, the BTK killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. There was a dark, lonely side of America where people were becoming more and more isolated from each other, and there were people preying on them.” — via Interview, April 2025
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The Dracula Tape
by Fred Saberhagen
“The reason people still read Dracula for fun is that it’s a really great book. There have been so many re-imaginings of it – there’s Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula; Tim Lucas’ The Book of Renfield; even Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker has written a retelling. But my favourite is Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, which is a bit forgotten now.” — via Interview, April 2025
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The Hunger
by Whitley Strieber
“And then you had the Hammer films of the late ’50s and into the ’60s, where Dracula was still evil, but he was becoming this romantic, brooding, gothic presence; then came Dracula on Broadway with Frank Langella, and the comedy Love at First Bite in the ’70s, and Blacula. That was when Dracula fully became a romantic partner and someone who was sexually desirable.” — via Interview, April 2025
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Carmilla
by Sheridan Le Fanu
“Carmilla is by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, and it was first published around 1872. Carmilla gave us, firstly, the trope of the lesbian vampire, which just goes on and on. I mean, Hammer Films practically made sexy sapphic vampires a sub-genre in the ’60s, and it continues today. But he also gave us a vampire that preys on human kindness.” — via Interview, April 2025