George R. R. Martin
The defining fantasist of the twenty-first century so far: ASOIAF normalised moral consequence and political realism in epic fantasy, created the grimdark mainstream, and via HBO made the genre a global mass medium.
Vampire Fiction
The undead aristocracy of horror, from Stoker's Count to sympathetic modern bloodsuckers.
The authors (4)
Richard Matheson
The great normaliser of horror: by relocating the uncanny to postwar ordinary life, Matheson built the road King drove down, and I Am Legend's last-man-amid-infection template underwrites half of modern apocalyptic fiction and…
Anne Rice
The author who made the vampire a point-of-view character and built the template — sympathetic immortals, gothic sensuality, found families of the undead — on which paranormal romance, urban fantasy and a thousand brooding…
Bram Stoker
Dracula codified the vampire for all time and established the template of ancient evil versus modern method that underpins a vast swathe of horror since.
Essential books, oldest first (5)
Dracula
The most influential horror novel in the language: the source code for vampire fiction and a permanent fixture of world culture, from Nosferatu and the Lugosi and Lee films onward.
I Am Legend
The foundation of modern apocalyptic horror: Romero credited it as Night of the Living Dead's seed, making it the zombie genre's grandparent; filmed three times (The Last Man on Earth, The Omega…
Interview with the Vampire
The founding text of sympathetic vampire fiction — ancestor of everything from Buffy's brooding ensemble to paranormal romance entire — filmed in 1994 with Cruise and Pitt and serialised by AMC;…
Fevre Dream
Widely rated among the best vampire novels of the century — Martin's pre-Westeros masterpiece, demonstrating the moral-greyness machinery a decade before A Game of Thrones, and a clear ancestor of…
The Vampire Lestat
The volume that built the Vampire Chronicles into a saga and a phenomenon — Lestat became the model immortal antihero, and the book's vampire-as-rock-star conceit defined gothic culture's…