Lust for Blood

If you want to get into the real history behind blood drinking, this is the place to start. This book offers a very readable basis in famous blood drinkers, biographies, looks at legends, folklore etc. I recommend this book for anyone interested in vampires more than any other book i have read on the subject

i love this book and i recommend this as the essential vampire bible. now, before you go and bash me and claim "the vampire book" should be, i ask you why? every page you can possibly randomly turn to is about film noir. who cares about fictional vampires when dealing with nonfiction text? there are boundless books on movie and fictional vampires, focusing primarily on THAT subject. Lust for Blood, focuses on real vampires with a tad of fictional movie references in it. the less use of film images the better, but i guess all texts have their flaws. nevertheless, this book has a great range of lore. the chapter titles themselves give you a glance at what you want to know, where to find it. this book is easy to navigate and does not require reading every single chapter, you can somewhat jump around. my only dislike is, as i've mentioned before, the film representation in the pictures. couldn't they at least use artist rendered drawings or peasant folklore drawings? anyways, this book is really good and i approve it.

This book is really not so much about the vampires of legend, lore and popular fiction as it is about the history of human beings who have had a "Lust for Blood." In other words, Olga G. Hoyt is concerned with blood fetishes. Like similar books which try to deal clincially with "vampires," this book makes a good case but most of us will not find it as fascinating as we do the stuff Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton and Joss Whedon have been coming up with. However, if you are interested in medical/psychological approaches to vampirism, this book is as good a place to start as any.

Not necessarily a cerebral read, but very interesting stories of those past and present with blood fetishes. Like a good ghost story, but true (as far as we know). Good history of sickos & murderers.