Associate Professor Gale Ruthven, a vampire with nearly four hundred years of service at eighty-three colleges and universities, teaches British Romantic poetry at an obscure commuter college somewhere in far West Texas, enjoying an existence of literary research, student papers, and the bare amount of blood-sucking necessary to survive. His chief aggravation is the Regency Romantic poet, Lord Byron, on whom he fed in 1816 and who refuses to play...