MLC's Book Club Guide to the American Southern Vampire

Katie Gill
Cataloging Librarian

This post originally broadcast on MLC Moments on Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

What do you think of when you think of vampires? Most people think about Count Dracula, the tall, imposing, Eastern European, prototypical vampire—the sort who lives in a castle and dines on the blood of young women, who’s repulsed by a cross or garlic, and who can only be killed by driving a wooden stake through the heart. Mention Dracula, and that’s a cue for everybody to do their best or worst Bela Lugosi impression—“the children of the night, what beautiful music they make.”

My awful attempts at that accent (you know the one) is the reason why I’m a librarian, not an actor.

But there are more to vampires than just Count Dracula. Some don’t live in castles, some are immune to garlic, and some are American. Think about the American vampire, and you’ll most likely think about the American South. One of the cities heavily linked to the Southern vampire is New Orleans, to the point where you can go on a ‘vampire tour’ of the city. While plenty of vampire media is set in New Orleans, perhaps the most famous is the Vampire Chronicles series by Anne Rice. The series, which started with Interview with the Vampire in 1976, reworked the vampire as a brooding, Byronic protagonist. Movies, a television adaptation, a dozen or so books, and legions of goths dreaming about the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt soon followed—as did other New Orleans-based media featuring vampires. The book Fevre Dream by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, the YA novel The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh, the notoriously terrible movie Dracula 2000, and the notoriously average movie Renfield are set in and around New Orleans.

One vampire-focused city does not make a trend, though. Sometimes the American vampire can be found in Appalachia, as is the case with the books They Hunger by Scott Nicholson and Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite. Sometimes the vampire is a new arrival to a Southern community, as in the book The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix. Sometimes, a small Southern town, rife with supernatural history is created to host the vampires. In the book series and CW television show The Vampire Diaries, our main cast resides in the fictional town of Mystic Falls, Virginia. In contrast, the spin-off series The Originals focuses on, where else... New Orleans.

Research on vampire media specifically set in Mississippi proved to be a bit trickier—though I did find one news article about vampire deer in our state. Unlike other fanged deer such as the Chinese water deer and the Siberian musk deer, the Mississippi vampire deer only had small, vestigial fangs that weren’t even visible to the naked eye—but that’s beside the point.

By far, the most results for Mississippi vampires were focused on a vampire series so entrenched with the US South it’s in the title itself: The Southern Vampire Mysteries series, written by Mississippi author Charlaine Harris. You might not recognize the title, but I’m sure you’ve at least heard of True Blood, the HBO television adaptation of the series starring Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, and Alexander Skarsgard.

The Southern Vampire Mysteries series focuses on Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who finds herself drawn into murder, mystery, and romance as she becomes more aware of the supernatural in her life. Though the series is mostly set around the fictional town of Bon Temps Louisiana, Sookie occasionally travels to other Southern locations where she ends up helping various Southern vampires solve their problems. In the third book of the series, Club Dead, Sookie visits Jackson, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of her vampire love interest, Bill. There are thirteen books in The Southern Vampire Mysteries series and seven seasons of the television show True Blood.

If you want read to read The Southern Vampire Mysteries or any of the other vampire books mentioned in this episode, check them out at your local public library. And who knows! The librarian might even share yet another vampire book set in New Orleans, or elsewhere in America, that you can add to your list.