title: True Vampires: Blood-Sucking Killers Past and Present
author: Sondra London
description: To begin with, London considers what a vampire is. Precise definitions are elusive, it seems, but given blood drinkers, flesh eaters, corpse fuckers, and their deeds that London efficiently presents, so what? She nicely balances old and new ghouls, reviewing the cases of Vlad Tepes, inspiration for Dracula, and fellow Transylvanian Countess Bathory, who bathed in blood rather than consumed it. Among contemporaries, London notes six-foot-eight aspiring rapper Big Lurch, arrested in L.A. in 2002, "buck naked, loping down South Figueroa[,] . . . his mumbling mouth slathered with blood, raw gore streaking down" his front. He was fresh from dispatching his girlfriend, having pulled out her right lung for a chew in the process; a "medical examination found human flesh and blood in the rangy rapper's stomach." Since London also discusses noncriminal, self-styled vampires and their motivations and exploits, perhaps it's wrong to view this as just a particularly bloody true-crime compendium. Still, gore is probably the main attraction of this exposure of some of "our most primordial fears." <i>Mike Tribby</i><br /><i>Copyright  American Library Association. All rights reserved</i>
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Last True Vampire
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Number I of _Last True Vampire_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Kate Baxter
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  St. Martin's Press (2015)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _As Michael's eyes lit on a female not twenty feet away, he knew
  
  
  without a doubt that it was her blood that called to him and her scent
  
  
  that had awakened him.This female had tethered his soul and returned it
  
  
  to him._
  
  
  
  
  
  **SOUL SURVIVOR**  
  He is the last
  
  
  of his race. The one true king of the vampires. Michael Aristov roams
  
  
  the nightclubs of L.A. after dark, haunted by his past and driven by his
  
  
  hunger. The last of the Ancient Ones, he alone has survived the
  
  
  destruction of his race at the hands of the slayers. Now he is forced to
  
  
  hunt and feed like a common vampire, a creature of lust. Nothing in
  
  
  this world can fulfill his needs…until he meets a woman who's everything
  
  
  he's ever wanted. And more.
  
  
  
  
  
  **SWEET SALVATION**  
  Her
  
  
  n