The plot revolved around a young man called Aubrey, who discovers that his aristocratic friend, Lord Ruthven, who is about to marry his sister, is a vampire.

Yet, it was perhaps Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula that really brought these fanged creatures to the fore. Inspired by The Vampyre, Dracula was written in 1897 and firmly entrenched vampire lore into popular culture.

The novel, adapted into several films, tells the story of Count Dracula though a series of letters and journal entries primarily written by Jonathan Harker, a solicitor who visits the evil Count in his eerie castle on the border of Transylvania, Bukovina and Moldavia.

Harker eventually realises that the aristocratic Count is a vampire who can shapeshift, but only after he is imprisoned by the Count in his castle.

It was after the 1970s that Anne Rice, known today as the 'Queen of Vampire Fiction', began to write a series of novels called The Vampire Chronicles of which the first was Interview with the Vampire.

Interview with the Vampire, written in 1976, is set on a Louisiana plantation in the year 1791. Lestat, the roguish vampire who you just cannot help admire, 'turns' a young man, Louis, into a vampire. But as the years go by, Louis, who prefers animal blood over that of humans, tires of Lestat, and wishes to move on. Seeing this, Lestat turns a five year old girl called Claudia, in the hope that both he and Louis will raise her as their daughter. Claudia, while immortalised in the young girl's body, begins to mature quickly, and together with Louis tries to kill Lestat, and move on to find more of their own kind in Europe.

While many of Rice's vampirical creations such as the charming Lestat or the do-gooder Louis displayed some human-like attributes such as humour and guilt respectively, it is the vampires introduced in the more recent times that seem to have truly changed.

Cases in point are Edward Cullen from The Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer, Stefan Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith and Bill Compton in

The Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris.

In these novels, which have become bestsellers across the world, vampires are no longer morbid creatures of the night, who can change into bats and possess an aversion to holy water and garlic.

Instead, they are extremely good-looking, sensitive and perhaps even more humane than human beings themselves, and are constantly trying to overcome their addiction to human blood. And in some cases, they seem to have more value for human life than the humans depicted in these novels.

In fact, it would be safe to say that vampires portrayed in these novels have made vampires an aspiration of sorts — after all, who wouldn't want to be immortal, young and drop dead gorgeous? (Assuming you can overlook the fact that you'd have to feed off a rat now and then to sustain yourself, of course.)

Of course, the novels have spawned several television shows and movies. So far, three of the books from The Twilight Saga (Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse) have been made into big budget films, while The Vampire Diaries has been adapted for television into a series of the same name. Meanwhile, The Southern Vampire Mysteries series, more popularly known as the Sookie Stackhouse books, has been adapted into a darker television show called True Blood.

Interestingly enough, there is a new book out recently called Jane Bites Back, which is based on the premise that Jane Austen is a vampire who was turned by Lord Byron, and is currently living in New York State, running a bookshop and writing novels in her spare time. (Given the fact that most vampires don't need to sleep, one can assume that she's written many a bestseller.)

While Jane Bites Back hasn't made it to television or Hollywood yet, perhaps given its tagline 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is still alive today... as a vampire...' the chances are that it just might.

In the meantime, vampire fans it seems have enough to read — and watch.

— Mamun Adil