Tessa's world exploded. She survived Deanna's inheritance. She sees more, hears more ... understands more. But more is not always better. Cody doesn't like what's happening around him. Tessa has walked through hell and she has a lot more to go before she's clear. He plans on standing by her side - her guardian - whether she wants him to be there for her or not. Jared can't believe all trails lead him into trouble. He'd escaped once. Tried to stay out of the mess since. But a friend is missing, and when he tries to get help, the person he confides in goes missing too. The vampire world was never ready for Tessa before. The new Tessa? No one is ready for her.

This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher René Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this ‘sacred violence’ through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.

“Vampires. Why do we care? In these pages you will find what is very simply, the most literate, imaginative, and just plain fascinating answer to that question ever written.” ?Whitley Strieber In a culture that does not do death particularly well, we are obsessed with mortality. Margot Adler writes, “Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury.” As Adler, a longtime NPR correspondent and question asker, sat vigil at her dying husband’s bedside, she found herself newly drawn to vampire novels and their explorations of mortality. Over the next four years—by now she has read more than 270 vampire novels, from teen to adult, from gothic to modern, from detective to comic—she began to see just how each era creates the vampires it needs. Dracula, an Eastern European monster, was the perfect vehicle for 19th-century England’s fear of outsiders and of disease seeping in through its large ports. In 1960s America, Dark Shadows gave us the morally conflicted vampire struggling against his own predatory nature, who still enthralls us today. Think Spike and Angel, Stefan and Damon, Bill and Eric, the Cullens. Vampires Are Us explores the issues of power, politics, morality, identity, and even the fate of the planet that show up in vampire novels today. Perhaps, Adler suggests, our blood is oil, perhaps our prey is the planet. Perhaps vampires are us.

Monsters have always rampant border crossers, from Dracula’s journey from Romania to Whitby, to the rampaging monsters of Godzilla movies across global cities. This volume studies how their transnationality reflects an era of global crisis. Monstrosity has long been explored in a number of ways that connect gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and other forms of otherness with depictions of monsters or monstrosity. This book, however, explores cultural flow as it relates to the construction of a transnational genre, by both producers and audiences. It also examines the ramifications of representations of monstrosity in socio-political terms as they relate to a tumultuous era of global crises. This era has of course been amplified and altered by the Covid pandemic, which frames much of the content of this collection. This ongoing crisis imbues the discourses of monstrosity, global catastrophe and societal and human vulnerability with its significant expression in artistic terms.

Famous for being deathly serious, the vampire genre has a consistent yet often critically overlooked subgenre--the comedic spoof and satire. This is the first book dedicated entirely to documenting and analyzing the vampire comedy on film and television. Various types of comedy are discussed, outlining the important differences between spoofing, serious-spoofing, parody and satire. Seminal films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Love at First Bite, Vampire in Brooklyn, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and What We Do In the Shadows are featured. More importantly, this book demonstrates how comedy is central to both the common perception of the vampire and the genre's ever-evolving character, making it an essential read for those interested in the laughing undead and creatures that guffaw in the night.

"Two suspicious writers from New York arrive in Quinnie Boyd's small Maine town. They claim to be the confidants of a vampire count. But Quinnie begins to wonder if the authors are vampires themselves"--

This book argues that in recent decades an unrestrained vampire-capitalism has emerged, disengaged from the needs of citizens and workers, leading to a deepening of social class, generational, gender, educational and ethnic divisions. The author explores how our cultural obsession with self-realization undermines our capacity for collective action and ability to confront threats such as climate change and the impact of the rapid advance of technology on labour. Drawing on sociology and political economy as well as worldwide case studies, the chapters interrogate how we arrived at these dilemmas and how we might escape them through establishing alternative social economies. Vampire Capitalism will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, social theory, globalisation studies, development studies, political economy, geography, politics and social policy.

Can Kit serve a vampire warlock without becoming evil herself? When vampires in Austin break the centuries-long code of silence, bloodsuckers around the world are forced to choose sides. Vampire Guild Leader Holzhausen allies with the traditionalist Quieters who kill those who speak the truth about their kind. Kit feels duty-bound to support her patron, but as a tsunami of vampires take to social media, the enormity of her boss’ position grows untenable. As Holzhausen uses dark curses and assassinations to solidify his political base, Kit realizes that the only way to keep from becoming complicit in her mentor’s massacres is to escape the city. But when a betrayal thwarts Kit’s plans to flee, she finds herself faced with an unspeakable choice: murder a friend or endanger her family’s lives by refusing. Will Kit remain loyal to the warlock who trained her or die for refusing to cross an ethical line? Vampire’s Pawn is the ninth book in the Kit Melbourne series. If you like character driven urban fantasy with an ethically nuanced plot, then you’ll love Kater Cheek’s dark novel. Buy Vampire’s Pawn to take a stand against evil today!