Blood Lust: A History

The New Yorker's Joan Acocella reviews the evolution of vampire lore from its origins in ancient superstition to Bram Stoker's fictive romanticization of "the undead" in Dracula:

Stoker did not invent vampires. If we define them, broadly, as the undead — spirits who rise, embodied, from their graves to torment the living — they have been part of human imagining since ancient times. Eventually, vampire superstition became concentrated in Eastern Europe. (It survives there today. In 2007, a Serbian named Miroslav Milosevic — no relation — drove a stake into the grave of Slobodan Milosevic.)

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