In honor of Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, this One Word Interview features the word VAMPIRE.

Special thanks to the young adult, dark fiction, and horror writers who participated in the Black Friday One Word Interview, featuring the VAMPIRE. This Black Friday, support young adult fiction by using your YALITCHAT coupon (see below) when making your book purchases at Borders Books in the store or online. While the coupon doesn’t give you additional discounts, Border’s Books will contribute a portion of your purchase to YALITCHAT, a nonprofit organization supporting the advancement of young adult literature around the world.

VAMPIRE

Vampire.
Fun, fangs and fabulosity…that’s what my heroine, Gina, fashionista of the damned, would say. Me? I’d say that death wipes the slate clean. Your identity dies with you. Rising from the dead is like rebirth and the possibility of reinvention. Sudden freedom often means a walk on the wild side. Maybe that’s the appeal.
– Lucienne Diver, ReVamped

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Vampires. The immortal leeches whose fictional portrayal changes to become whatever we need at the time–a warning or a promise. Alternately, the real and mortal and wealthy leeches who thrive on the thankless efforts of the herd.
– Christopher Golden, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3 and When Rose Wakes

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VAMPIRE:
That haunting sinister beauty which teaches you not to be afraid of the dark…even when there might be something to be afraid of!

Also they’ve had centuries to practice kissing. Just saying.
– Alyxandra Harvey, Out for Blood

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VAMPIRE
Buffy got it right. You can die young and stay pretty. I love vampires. Brooding, evil, savage, romantic. Conflicted. And powerful. The perfect, changeable monster, demon lover, warrior, canvas. Give me a fang long enough and a coffin in which to place it, and I shall move the world.
– Nancy Holder, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3 and Crusade

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Vampire.
Midnight liaisons. Velvet seduction. A tiny sting, and maidens—demure or tempestuous—find that as blood flows, minds dissolve together. Ineffable ecstasy. Militant optimism. Villainy redeemed through the cataclysm of pure love. Um, wait . . . Do I really write this stuff for a living?
– L.J. Smith, The Vampire Diaries

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Vampires will always fascinate us, because they live on the boundaries we rarely dare to cross, between worlds we try to keep separate. Human and wild. Past and present. Pleasure and pain. And most important–life and death. Whether attacked by crosses or critics, vampires will always rise again.
– Jeri Smith-Ready, “Thief,” Eternal and Bring on the Night

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Vampire: A living, a heroine, a chance to pursue my dream. Buffy, Angel, Spike, the Scooby gang. Joss Whedon, the master. Polidori, the first. Bram Stoker, the best. I owe them all.
– Jeanne Stein, Chosen

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A Vampire Haiku

The myths got it wrong
Vampires walk in the sunshine
Look in your mirror

Forget wooden stakes
Your ego is immortal
Bare your fangs, monster

Listen up, mortals
Bloodlust is human nature
We are the vampires.
– Jaye Wells, The Mage in Black

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And, because it seems only fair to include the dead in this Black Friday interview, a special response from the vampire master himself:

The vampire lives on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty.
– Bram Stoker, Dracula (3)

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And a special audio treat in honor of the VAMPIRE, a link to David Tenant reading A Night With A Vampire for BBC4’s program A Book at Bedtime.

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There are few figures who have swept through modern literature as swiftly and effectively as the vampire. They are everywhere, taking different forms, and hiding among us as one of our kind. Lestat, Edward, Bill, Angel, Spike, Nosferatu, and Dracula – just to name a few – are fictional vampires who terrify, captivate, and entertain us. New vampires are born every day as young adult literature continues to embrace these seductive fiends.

Vampires evolved from traditional folklore as ugly, terrible, and generally male creatures.(1) Then came Geraldine, arguably the first literary vampire, born from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination within his poem “Christabel,” published in the late 1700s. Lord Byron, so impressed by the poem, read it aloud upon several occasions, including the afternoon tea party in which a group of Romantic poets traded ghost stories. Coleridge’s poem inspired the group to engage in a “written competition of supernatural tales,”(2) resulting in the creation of two historically significant gothic tales: Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre.