Tag Archives: books

Just out of curiosity, is there any books you recommend that have a similar humorous/ dark tone as VC?

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Hey! Book reccs! Always a good topic.

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It’s tough for me to answer bc I think it depends on every individual reader’s sense of humor,… even within “humorous/ dark tone as VC” there is a range*. So I can’t say definitively that these reccs are in line with what you’re looking for necessarily, but you can use this list as a starting point.

*Lestat dancing w/ Claudia’s mom’s corpse: Some ppl find this moment dark and hilarious and other ppl think it’s just disgusting, so… there is a range. Personally I find it pretty amusing.

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(There are some duplicates on this list, sorry about that, but I wanted to list them by recc’er.) (And I added ** next to those that @gothiccharmschool​ just recc’d in two recent posts which I will reblog momentarily for you.)

In no special order:

  • (Okay this is the first one bc it IS special, and the closest to the humor of VC I’ve seen in awhile) This is a mockumentary/movie but it sneaks onto the top of the list bc it is just SO good, courtesy of @theamazingdrunk for reminding me in a comment on an older rec post:​ WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
  • **Salem’s Lot – Stephen King, personally, I find several Stephen King books to be darkly humorous, this one is a good one. I find humor in the Shining and Firestarter, too, but less so. 
  • Vittorio – don’t forget Vittorio. Not sure if you read this one. It’s also by Anne Rice and technically not a VC book, he has a different origin story and is not part of the VC vampire group.
  • Some short stories – @soyonscruels​ posted: those who dream only by night: the gothic short stories rec list – Not full-length books but still, short stories are good! There are 20 short stories listed, writers include @neil-gaiman​, Roald Dahl, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, each of whom I’ve found to have some level of humor along w/ dark tones.
  • More E. A. Poe is offered up here, from @keep-calm-and-heta-oni​, which includes little capsules about each.
  • @consultingcupcake​ said: “I really love the Cirque du Freak series, and **Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite. Both have teenage protagonists
  • @fantasticfelicityfox​ said: The Historian is very good
  • @stitcheskitty​ said: Sookie Stackhouse novels

  • Movie and book (and a few anime) Recommendations here.

  • @riverofwhispers said: Carmilla is good
    Anita Blake and Sookie Stackhouse books, but only the early ones.
    the Rachel Morgan series but again starts out good gets weird later and it’s not about vampires so much as there are vampires in it.
  • @bluestockingcouture said: ‘The Angel’s Cut’, sequel to ‘The Vintner’s Luck’, is very atmospheric and well worth reading. Not quite as moving and intense, but there are some excellent new characters.
  • @sanguinivora said: Also, as to voice: IWTV opens in the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. Don’t know about either a southern American or French hinterlands-with-a-gloss-of-Parisian dialect, but for the grammar and vocabulary, one cannot go too far wrong looking to the novels of Jane Austen and Patrick O’Brian.
  • @dragontrainerdaenerys said: I just read Fevre Dream, George R.R Martin’s own vampire novel, and while I didn’t liked much his vampire mythology the main characters are charming! Besides, it’s set on the late 18XX and goes on the Mississipi River, so it has similar scenarios to IWTV!
  • @baroquebat said: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, while futuristic, has a loooot of lovely gothic set pieces in the anime movie, plus its just gorgeous and has the rare treat of having a dhampir lead!

@annabellioncourt’s Recs, and these are mostly her descriptions, too, compiled from other recc posts:

  • The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories – Angela Carter
  • Carmilla – Bunch of adaptations of this.
  • A Taste of Blood Wine –  Freda Warrinton, for romance and decadence.
  • **Blood Opera Sequence (or “Trilogy”?) –  Tanith Lee’s vampire series was out when Lestat was playing rockstar
  • Historian – Elizabeth Kostova, for its worldliness
  • **Fevre Dream (yes its spelled fevre) by George R. R. Martin (yes, its THAT Martin, and his take on vampires is Very Good.)
  • Sunshine by Robin McKinley
  • **The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot, also for romance and decadence. (the recently-published edition from Valancourt Books has a foreword by @gothiccharmschool!)
  • The Hunger by Whitley Scriber
  • **Dracula – Bram Stoker, for its stereotype-setting content
  • Lord Ruthven – Byronic vampire, Lestat doesn’t catch the irony of John Polidori’s mockery of the foppish, arrogant, and well…Lord-Byron-y vampire

>>>>Moar recs from @annabellioncourt​ under Spooky Book Recommendations

>>>>Moar recs from @gothiccharmschool: here, here, and in her #vampire books and #vampire novels tags. 

>>>>My #VC adjacent recs tag

Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment on this with other VC-adjacent book recs! 

@hyperbeeb (<– is very well-read and took one for the team to read Blood Vivicanti!), @gothiccharmschool, @fyeahgothicromance, @thebibliosphere, (@annabellioncourt, too, but you are technically off the hook as I’ve already posted your recs!), got any recs for books w/ similar humorous/ dark tone as VC? 

awww ok :( thanks for answering anyway. and there’s no ebay for my country and international country’s ebays have shipping that can be up to $100, even if a friend shipped they would pay similar costs because my country does not like things going in and out. New Zealand and England? haha I wish i lived somewhere as nice and safe lol

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I’m sorry that it’s hard for you to get the VC books 😦

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But again, and I don’t know about your internet connection, but here in the US it’s pretty easy to find VC online by googling for the pdfs. 

What about libraries in your country? Sometimes you can ask your library to bring in books.

I get that shipping is expensive. I actually did a giveaway post where I offered to ship a few VC out as prizes, which I bought at a library book sale for like $1-$2 each, and I still intend to ship them out. Message me off-anon and let’s see if we can work something out. 

BTW, if anyone is interested in shipping their unwanted VC book(s) out to someone in a foreign country who really wants to read them, as a show of VC fandom solidarity, message me!

Do you know if there’s a place to read the vampire chronicles online?? I only ask because I can’t find a site that ships the books to my country :(

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I’m sorry, but sharing links to books for free online is illegal and my blog could get shut down for doing that 😛 so I’m asking that no one reblog this with links like that. 

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HOWEVER: I have done the google and found all of the VC (except PL and PLROA) illegally uploaded as pdfs, they’re not that hard to find. The problem with those pdfs is that the formatting is often wonky and there are misspellings, which can lead to misunderstanding the text.

You could also buy them on eBay, right? Someone must be willing to ship to your country.

Or make a friend who has access and is willing to ship to your country, you can work out some kind of payment situation with them. I’ve shipped books as gifts to friends in New Zealand and England.

Can anyone actually see the books Claudia is reading up on in the film? Before her and Louis begin to travel.

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I bet Louis and the guys in that library scene saw what she was reading! But the audience? No, we don’t see what the titles of her books are… but maybe someone recognizes the illustration style in this one, at least, and can tell us? It looks like “Hell and Damnation” is a chapter in it. Maybe it’s a book the props people designed just for the movie, though.

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In the movie, Louis says:

“She studied the myths and legends of the Old World, obsessed with the search for what she called ‘our kind’ ”

^So, probably books about those that were available in the US in 1860ish.

Hit the jump for a book!IWTV quote, cut for length.

I can’t find any references to specific titles mentioned in book!IWTV either.

In the book, this is what Louis says about Claudia’s interest in going to Europe, but not that she studied any specific books about it:

“Meantime, she made a plan. It was her idea most definitely that we must go first to central Europe, where the vampire seemed most prevalent. She was certain we could find something there that would instruct us, explain our origins. But she seemed anxious for more than answers: a communion with her own kind. She mentioned this over and over, `My own kind,’ and she said it with a different intonation than I might have used. She made me feel the gulf that separated us. In the first years of our life together, I had thought her like Lestat, imbibing his instinct to kill, though she shared my tastes in everything else. Now I knew her to be less human than either of us, less human than either of us might have dreamed. Not the faintest conception bound her to the sympathies of human existence. Perhaps this explained why – despite everything I had done or failed to do – she clung to me. I was not her own kind. Merely the closest thing to it.”

Video

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annabellioncourt:

gothiccharmschool:

I feel this video was more successful than the companion video, 40 Years of Women’s Goth Style. This one felt less costume-y, and more authentic.

Also, I predictably covet the shirt, coat, and cape from the 90s vampire look. My cliches, I embrace them.

I was hesitant, but yeah, this felt so much more natural than the women’s one did; save for the cyber punk and some of the make up on the death rock one, this is more of what I’ve actually witnessed (….though I’ve only been in the sub-culture a decade, and only aware of it for a little more than that)

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(^Anne Rice book spotted in the Women’s Goth Style vid!)

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monstersinthecosmos:

firelight-fading:

monstersinthecosmos:

Back in September I bought cheap used copies of all the Vampire Chronicles (and New Tales) for myself so that I could reread them in time for PLatRoA. And I wrote in them and stuff. It was pretty fun. I crammed all 14 books in 10 weeks and it was PRETTY EXHILARATING. 

So anyway, for as long as it interests me, watch this space as I flip through them again and make posts of quotes and passages that I enjoyed. 🙂

I’ve been wanting to do this myself for the longest time!! Do the different colors of highlighted passages mean anything? 🙂

yisssss 

I was mostly just using the pink primarily (sometimes I switched to green because I went through like 4 packs of highlighters and tbh Marius is a Highliter Ruiner and I kept running the pink ones out), but I’d switch to blue if I wanted to extra emphasize something in the paragraph, or I’d switch back and forth with pink & blue if there were two paragraphs/sentences back to back that I wanted to highlight for different reasons, like I found each section to be a complete idea etc. Then I saved purple for EXTRA IMPORTANT STUFF. 

It was really fun and enlightening and definitely heightened my enjoyment of these stories. Plus like, I’ll be honest, not every step of the way was the most academic endeavor, because I was highlighting and noting a mix of “This is really important to the plot and this character” and “THIS GIVES ME THE LOLS” 

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You should do it! IT WAS FUN. 😀

^There is SO MUCH humor in VC!!! I feel like ppl forget that sometimes…

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^This would be all over everything if I did this… w/ tons of 😀 and D:

Source: monstersinthecosmos

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monstersinthecosmos:

Back in September I bought cheap used copies of all the Vampire Chronicles (and New Tales) for myself so that I could reread them in time for PLatRoA. And I wrote in them and stuff. It was pretty fun. I crammed all 14 books in 10 weeks and it was PRETTY EXHILARATING. 

So anyway, for as long as it interests me, watch this space as I flip through them again and make posts of quotes and passages that I enjoyed. 🙂

#ART