3 Vampire Books You Need to Read – Blood, Teeth, and Eternity

I love a good book recommendation, and it doesn’t take much to convince me to grab a new vampire tale. The three books below feature characters who kick ass and face monsters outside and within themselves. There’s a lot of neat mythology here–though there’s only three books, the third is an anthology from some great authors who really use the short form to play with their own ideas for the undead. That’s something a really great vampire story has to have to keep me hooked: details for the vamps. Do they turn to dust? How do they die? I wish more stories said how often they really need to eat. What happens if they don’t? Give me all the bloody details!

What do you look for in a vampire book?

3 Different, and Awesome, Books of Blood and Teeth

What Kills Me by Wynne Channing 

Description:  

An ancient prophecy warns of a girl destined to cause the extinction of the vampire race.
So when 17-year-old Axelia falls into a sacred well filled with blood and emerges a vampire, the immortal empire believes she is this legendary destroyer. Hunted by soldiers and mercenaries, Axelia and her reluctant ally, the vampire bladesmith Lucas, must battle to survive.

How will she convince the empire that she is just an innocent teenager-turned bloodsucker and not a creature of destruction? And if she cannot, can a vampire who is afraid of bugs summon the courage to fight a nation of immortals?

QUOTES

• “I just thought vampires would look, you know, vicious while drinking blood,” I said. “You look like you’re in kindergarten with your juice pack.”
  ― Wynne Channing, What Kills Me
• “You should be grateful that you were even blessed for a moment. You have been rescued from your rotting corpse. You have experienced immortality. You have experienced perfection. Look at yourself. This is your purest form. Your worst qualities have been sifted out, the flaw and weaknesses blown away. The way you have been experiencing the world with your pathetic human senses? Now you know. You were living in a fog. You were appreciating only a fraction of what this world has to offer. That life was worth nothing.”
  ― Wynne Channing, What Kills Me
• “Sorry, dear. This isn´t a fairy tale. There´s no happily ever after. Just… ever after.”
  ― Wynne Channing, What Kills Me

 Note: This one is a free ebook! Get it on Kindle or pretty much anywhere else. No excuses not to give this great book a look!

The Coldest Girl In Coldtown by Holly Black
Description:  
Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is a wholly original story of rage and revenge, of guilt and horror, and of love and loathing from bestselling and acclaimed author Holly Black.

QUOTES

(This book is so quotable it really requires some restraint here)

• “If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic.”
  ― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
• “Death’s favorites don’t die.”
  ― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
• “I haven’t had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone’s dead and my root beer’s gone.”
  ― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Teeth: Vampire Tales, an anthology

Sink your teeth into these bite-sized tales exploring the intersections among the living, dead, and undead. Features stories by Neil Gaiman, Melissa Marr, Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Garth Nix, and many more.

QUOTES

It’s hard to find quotes from short stories in anthologies online, and I read this book on paper so I didn’t mark any of my own, but I did find this big section from the introduction, and guess what! It talks about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my one true love. So here we go…

“It was Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you’ll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she’d make it to her high school prom. Buffy’s story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon’s dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves.”
― Ellen Datlow, Teeth: Vampire Tales

What are some great vampire reads you’ve loved lately? Please leave your recommendations below, I’m always looking!