Guide Books

Firstly and most importantly, Anne Rice has a guide to her Vampire Chronicles series. It is called The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and was written by Anne Rice and Katherine Ramsland.

This book gives insights from Anne Rice; answering some questions while raising others.

There are many other guidebooks for vampires, some are specific to series (such as Buffy or Twilight), but there are also those which try to get to the origins, lore and mythology of vampires. Those are the guides that I will be showcasing.

The first is The Vampire: A Casebook edited by Alan Dundes and published in 1998.

This book gives detailed accounts of how the vampire lore has developed in different cultures. This work has compiled the research of eleven leading scholars from many fields such as history, anthropology, and psychiatry. The essays focus on folk tradition, not movies and novels. They examine the history of the word vampire in various languages, tracing its origins.

The second book I’ve chosen is Vampire History and Lore by Stuart A. Kallen, published in 2010. This title explores vampires from ancient times to the twenty first century.

The next book that I’ve chosen is Vampire, written by Cornelius Van Helsing and Mary-Jane Knight and illustrated by Philip Jacobs, Gary Blythe, Mike Peterkin and Gustav De Wolff.

This guidebook is a fictional journal, it tells of the vampires that the author has met. It includes foldout maps, booklets of vampire lore, Helsing’s letters, images etc.