series3 books1975
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Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot follows writer Ben Mears as he returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that its residents are being turned into vampires by a newly arrived stranger. It transplants Gothic vampire horror into a small New England community, tracking that community's collapse under a supernatural siege. It is a single, self-contained novel.
universe144 books1897
Start hereDracula · Start here
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"Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring" — so the Count greets his guest at the threshold of the Carpathians, and the great door shuts behind. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is the wellspring of the modern vampire: the account of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman who quits his crumbling castle for the crowded lodging-houses of London, and the handful of ordinary people — a young solicitor, a doctor of the mad, a professor of stranger learning — who must piece together what he is before he makes the whole city his fold. It is told wholly in fragments: journal entries, letters, telegrams, ships' logs, phonograph cylinders, each hand recording only its own sliver of the dark. Around that single novel a whole crypt of continuations has grown, raised by many writers across a century. Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Sequence hands the Count the microphone, retelling the old events from his own wry, aggrieved lips and following him into later intrigues. Robert Lory's brisk 1970s Dracula Horror Series revives him as a reluctant weapon turned against fouler things; Peter Tremayne's trilogy reaches back along his bloodline; and further sequels, a Quincey Morris spin-off, and Dracula's Children carry the shadow onward. This is a loose shared world built upon a public-domain figure, not one governed continuity — each author remakes him as villain, antihero, or sympathetic narrator. Begin, always, with Stoker's original; the letters and the mounting dread stand entirely on their own. From there follow whichever door tempts you — Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape for the monster's own confession, Lory or Tremayne for tales that never glance back at the Borgo Pass again.
series5 books1977
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Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining follows the Torrance family as winter caretakers of the isolated, malevolent Overlook Hotel, where father Jack is gradually consumed by the hotel's influence while his young son Danny's psychic "shining" draws its attention. Doctor Sleep (2013) picks up the story decades later, following Danny as an adult still marked by that childhood ordeal. Together the two form a horror duology spanning nearly forty years of real-world publication.
series42 books1993
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Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books have sold more than six million copies; many have made The New York Times Best Seller list.
series15 books1976
completed
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The Vampire Chronicles is a series of Gothic vampire novels and a media franchise, created by American author Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.
Richard Mathesonstandalone novel1954
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The last human survivor of the vampire epidemic has to maintain his defences against their onslaught, while attempting to research the cause and possibly solution to the plague. Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can a man survive like this?
series26 books1982
completed
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Brian Lumley's Necroscope opens an eighteen-book horror saga (1982-2017) centered on Harry Keogh, a man who can speak with the dead. Harry turns that gift against Thibor Ferenczy, a vampire buried since the Middle Ages, and against Ferenczy's agent Boris Dragosani, a Soviet spy who has learned to tear secrets from corpses in pursuit of world domination. Later volumes follow Harry's descendants and successors through further wars against the vampiric Wamphyri, across sequel trilogies and story collections.
universe46 books1967
Start hereThe Gunslinger · Start here
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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So begins the long walk of Roland Deschain, last of an order of knight-errant pistoleers, across a land that has "moved on" — where the compass points drift, dead machines rot toward sentience, and the weave of what's real wears thin. His quest is the Dark Tower itself: a spire standing at the hub of every world that exists, the linchpin that holds all of them back from ruin. Roland's road runs eight volumes, from The Gunslinger through the closing Dark Tower, with the later, interleaved tale The Wind Through the Keyhole folding a story-within-a-story back into his youth. Along the way he draws a ka-tet — a fellowship bound by fate, not choosing — through doorways between worlds: a heroin-shackled New Yorker, a woman of two minds, a boy who dies twice. The Tower is also the secret axle around which the wider shelf of King's work turns; threads from The Stand, 'Salem's Lot and beyond wind quietly toward it. Expect a mongrel of Western, high fantasy, horror and decayed science fiction, told in a dusty, incantatory dialect all its own — ka, thankee-sai, the world that has moved on. This is King at his most mythic and most personal, a decades-spanning circle that rewards a patient reader. Begin at the beginning: The Gunslinger, then walk forward in publication order. There are other worlds than these — but this door opens first.
Richard Laymonstandalone novel1996
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It's almost midnight. Cat's on the bed, facedown and naked. She's Sam's former girlfriend, the only woman he's ever loved. Sam's in the closet, with a hammer in one hand and a wooden stake in the other. Together they wait as the clock ticks down because ... the vampire is coming.When Cat first appeared at Sam's door he couldn't believe his eyes. He hadn't seen her in ten years, but he'd never forgotten her. Not for a second. But before this night is through, Sam will enter a nightmare of blood and fear that he'll never be able to forget -- no matter how hard he tries.
series2 books1969
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Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.
series3 books1981
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Whitley Strieber's The Hunger centers on Miriam Blaylock, a beautiful, wealthy vampire who takes human lovers and transforms them into vampire-human hybrids, feeding off them across centuries. Two later novels, The Last Vampire and Lilith's Dream, continue Miriam's story into the modern era.
series4 books1974
completed
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The Rats, James Herbert's 1974 debut novel, imagines a plague of giant mutant rats overrunning London, told through a rotating cast of victims and survivors in the tradition of British disaster horror. It was followed by two sequels, Lair and Domain, which widen the outbreak first to the countryside and then to a besieged, apocalyptic city, completing a three-book trilogy.
series3 books2009
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When a Boeing 777 lands at JFK Airport with nearly everyone aboard dead, CDC epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather is called in and instead uncovers a vampiric plague beginning to spread through New York City. Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain trilogy follows Goodweather and Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian as they race to stop an ancient vampire, the Master, from subjugating humanity, while Goodweather also tries to keep his own family safe from the outbreak. The story runs across The Strain, The Fall, and The Night Eternal.
series2 books1981
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In Robert R. McCammon's They Thirst, an ancient vampire prince arrives in Los Angeles and, in a matter of nights, begins turning the city into a stronghold for the undead, with Disneyland as an eerie staging ground for his conquest. A homicide detective, a reporter, and a small band of ordinary Angelenos piece together what's happening after a chilling séance warning, racing to stop the infestation before it spreads beyond the city. It's a large-canvas, multi-character vampire-apocalypse novel in the vein of McCammon's early horror work.
series3 books1989
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Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard reimagines the lives of Byron, Shelley, and Keats through a secret history in which they are stalked and inspired by a nephilim, a shape-shifting vampiric being that acts as a deadly muse. Physician Michael Crawford is drawn into their orbit after inadvertently marrying himself to one of the creatures, setting off a pursuit across the Alps to break her hold on him. The 2012 sequel, Hide Me Among the Graves, moves the same secret history forward into Victorian London.
series2 books1987
completed
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Live Girls is Ray Garton's best-known novel, a horror title that earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination among the roughly 68 books he wrote across a long horror-fiction career. Night Life continues the same series with a second entry published nearly two decades later.
series7 books1994
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Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga follows Peter Octavian, a centuries-old vampire working as a private investigator in a Boston where humans live alongside a hidden population of supernatural creatures, beginning with Of Saints and Shadows. Later volumes widen the cast and stakes across a war among vampires, angels, and demons that runs through the mid-1990s and returns with new entries into the 2010s.
Stephen Kingstandalone novel2006
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In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.