utter randomonium

So after yesterday’s discussion of romance novels it occurs to me that maybe I really am a generic trend-follower and the real draw for me, regardless of genre, is vampires. Case in point:

• Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles: These ate my brain* for a while during college. Interview with the Vampire (and the associated movie) remains my favorite, perhaps because of an affinity for Louis that Rice herself obviously did not share. (In an intro to the IwtV DVD, Rice referred to Lestat as her “dark lover.” Um.) The books declined in quality as time went on, and eventually I gave up without reading Memnoch the Devil and only bothered with a few of the spin-offs (The Vampire Armand, Violin, and Pandora, if I recall correctly).
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula: I actually rather enjoyed the book (to which the movie was reasonably true), but it didn’t have a whole lot of Dracula in it. (More detail at my post on the Dueling Monsters Read-a-long.)
• Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The film was fairly forgettable, but I really liked the series, to the point where I was perfectly happy watching back-to-back-to-back episodes during much of graduate school.
• Van Helsing: Silliness to the extreme and felt more like fanfic than homage, but I loved it for what it was.
• Twilight: Oh god, don’t get me started. Short version: this horribly-written series totally ate my brain* for several months in 2009.
• Count Duckula: Probably my favorite recurring guest star on Dangermouse, but I’m not sure that has anything to do with him being a vampire.

So I guess this means I would probably enjoy The Lost Boys, Underworld, Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Hellsing, Cirque du Freak, and Vampire Hunter D. The question is: where to start?

*ate my brain: overwhelmed my psyche, to the point where I was thinking about it practically nonstop and could not get enough of it. See also: short-term obsession. (To be fair, this also happened when I read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. So there’s that.)