Sparkles and vegetarianism do not a sustainable villian base make. Neil Gaiman quoted first in the excerpt below:

“My next big novel was going to have a vampire. Now, I’m probably not. They are everywhere, they’re like cockroaches.”

He said he hoped that mainstream culture would lose its interest in the undead so that vampire fiction could regain its potency. “Maybe it’s time for this to play out and go away. It’s good sometimes to leave the field fallow. I think some of this stuff is being over-farmed,” he said.

Many in the horror fiction community felt that the rise of glamorous, fanged creations in books and shows such as True Blood (based on Charlaine Harris’s novels), the Night World series and The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith, and Twilight, Stephanie Meyer’s series of books which have been turned into blockbuster films, have helped to create a new generation of “softer” vampires. Sam Stone, a member of the British Fantasy Society and creator of The Vampire Gene Trilogy, said the fault lay with the “huge influx on the market of paranormal romances and teen vampire fiction”.

“I personally think vampires should not be depicted as vegetarians, as they are by Meyer. In other books, they tend to be quite neurotic. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was so good because it was dark, multi-layered with violence that was inferred. Teen vampire fiction is spoiling that,” she said.