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As a self-confessed vampire prude (I developed most of my beliefs about vampires from the old Ravenloft sourcebooks), I'm always nervous to read a different take on the creatures of the night. I'm afraid that if something is too different to the canon I have in my head, I'll get upset. And to be honest, that's happened in the past.

But this... this book was GOOD! It's familiar enough that it doesn't feel like a betrayal of everything I hold dear about vampires, but at the same time it's a different take. Some things are different to what you may have grown up believing, but that doesn't offend you because it's all internally consistent, and it makes perfect sense why they're are different.

It's a good story too, set in late 1800s England, Italy, and France (although it was published in 1982).

I don't know if I'd call this the BEST vampire story I've ever read, but it's up there. If you're a fan of the genre, I highly recommend it.

This is another one of those stories I've had on my TBR list for a long time. Since the movie came out, actually -- although I've not seen the movie.

It was okay. A good story, and pretty absurd (which was the point), but I feel like it could've been better. Maybe if we'd heard a bit more about Benjamin's mom, for example... Although maybe she died in childbirth; we're not told. For that matter, what must it have been like to give birth to a fully grown man?

Sure, in the time in which this story was set, we don't really worry too much about what women think, and we certainly don't talk about things like childbirth in great detail, but still. There are other women in this story who got quite important roles. Why not Benjamin's mother?

This story raises more questions than it answers... but again, that's probably the point.

Also the ebook I read wasn't very well edited. I kept seeing line breaks in the middle of sentences, and weird punctuation. Maybe it was OCRed from the print version, and that's why.

I should point out, however, that this is the very first work I've ever read by this author. I've never read The Great Gatsby either.