Vampires

Vampires have long been objects of fascination in history, literature and lore. With the Nov. 20 release of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," HBO's "True Blood" and their countless imitators, Americans are welcoming vampires into their homes again. Though many consider Transylvania to be the lair of vampirism, there's plenty of vampire culture right here. Whether you have just come out of the coffin or long thirsted for night life, these locations offer plenty of opportunities to explore the dark side.

Up in the hills, past cornfields, past grazing cows, past weather-beaten barns, past an American flag flapping in a grove of sunflowers, past a little river called the Little River, is a tiny white house with bird feeders on the deck and a green flag festooned with pictures of flowers and butterflies. It's the headquarters of the empire that vampires built. Here, Angela Kessler and Warren Lapine live in bucolic wedded bliss.

A group of teenagers from a self-described "Vampire Clan" in Kentucky were arrested Thursday night in Baton Rouge, La., on murder warrants in the bludgeoning deaths of a Florida couple. Richard and Naomi Wendorf were found beaten to death in Eustis late Monday and their 15-year-old daughter was missing. At first, investigators feared that she had been abducted. Then they realized that she was a suspect, along with her former boyfriend and three other teenagers linked to the Kentucky group.

In the rank epistemology of vampire lore, bar-hopping doesn't loom as a dominant trait. But times change, and so do vampires. At the movies these days, chances are you'll find the sun-starved scamps skulking at the local nightclub, if they're not moping, that is, or plotting to take over the world--the other dominant modern-day vampire modes.

Anne Rice, the author who gave new life to the undead, lives in a house full of saints. Her library holds half a dozen 15-inch to 2 1/2-foot-high statues, including a porcelain Virgin Mary and Child dressed in embroidered velvet and stiff gold lace. Almost life-sized wooden figures of Mary and of St. Lucy, holding two eyeballs on a plate, stand serenely in a dining room decorated with antebellum murals of rural Italy. A smaller, arrow-pierced St.

Even by the standards of the paranormal romances that occupy the top slots of bestseller lists, Derek McCormack's new novel of cursed crooners, murderous fashion designers and homosexual vampires is an exercise in campy excess. Taking its name from carny speak for a performance that features animal acts, "The Show That Smells" spins off the actual premise of country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers dying young as a result of tuberculosis.

Sometimes inspiration comes in the unlikeliest places. While vacationing in Puerto Vallarta in fall 2008, USC professor Deborah Harkness, a historian of science, was consumed with the upcoming bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth, but the rest of the world, including the airport in the Mexican resort city, was gripped by a madness spread by vampires: The last of Stephenie Meyer's four "Twilight" novels had just been published. "To walk through the airport was to be hit with vampires, witches, ghosts and demons at every angle in the bookstores," says Harkness, a good-humored and enthusiastic woman of 46, over a cappuccino in Pasadena.

NBC's "Grimm" and ABC's "Once Upon a Time" are two structurally different shows — one is a police procedural, the other a family drama — that share the same twist: fairy tales as historical nonfiction. In "Grimm," David Giuntoli plays Nick Burckhardt, a Portland, Ore., police detective who discovers that he is the latest in a long line of second-sighted slayers, sort of like Buffy only with fairy-tale monsters instead of vampires. In "Once Upon a Time," Jennifer Morrison (late of "House")

An Australian billboard showing the physical deterioration of a pretty young woman over two years of drug abuse inspired "Daybreakers" creature designer Steven Boyle to give the film's badly mutated "Subsiders" vampires similar characteristics. "When people see the Subsiders, I wanted them to feel pity and disgust before they felt fear," Boyle said. While some of the vampires got away with minimal makeup, performer Bryan Probets had to wear a full-body foam latex suit. Everything was covered except for the inside of his ears and the soles of his feet.