Comments on: [GUEST POST] Laura Resnick on How to Safely Retread Zombies and Vampires

By: Pabkins

Pabkins — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 03:48:17 +0000

You know if book one was at the bookstore when borders went out of business I would have bought it - I searched to - I absolutely love these covers. I will break down and buy them soon but currently the hubs has put me on a book buying restriction...*sadface* I was a naughty girl and spent way too much

Pabkins @ Mission to Read

By: Laura Resnick

Laura Resnick — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:36:26 +0000

Although some means of warding off vampires in various traditions included things which made their way into fiction and became familiar (ex. garlic, silver, crucifix), I also uncovered many apotropaics that were unfamiliar to me. One that I particularly liked, but never found a chance to use in VAMPARAZZI, alas, was: To keep a vampire away at night, sleep beneath a cloth covered in human excrement. (Presumably this kept away everyone else, too.)

By: Paul (@princejvstin)

Paul (@princejvstin) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:16:48 +0000

To give another example: Vampires bursting into flames or withering into ashes when exposed to sunlight is also strictly an invention of fiction and film; folkloric vampires are typically active by night rather than day, but there is no tradition of sunlight being fatal (or, rather, terminal) for them.

Too right. Heck, the late Fred Saberhagen had Dracula walking around in the daylight in his novel, happy that the "slanting British sunshine" allowed him greater flexibility to do that than back home in the Carpathians.