There's no burying vampire mania

I'm a vampire, he's a vampire, won't you be a vampire too?

Gee, thanks, Count. Thanks, but no.

Despite being a lifelong vampire aficionado (um, does that sound creepy?), I'd rather be a vampire hunter right now. We're crypt-deep in vampires, thanks in part to an avalanche of mega-selling books and films, including Twilight, True Blood, the Underworld Trilogy, and their rapidly mutating spawn.

Pop-cult trends don't usually last this long. After nearly two years, vamp craze continues to rage.

Not even PBS's leading TV philosopher, Count von Count, could have anticipated how thoroughly we'd be saturated by the latest hyped-to-the-hilt pop-cult product phenom.

What's next? Barney and SpongeBob SquarePants with gleaming white fangs?

The publishing industry has been in a tizzy over vampires.

PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author Justin Cronin sparked a fierce bidding war in the summer of 2007 over film rights for an unfinished 397-page manuscript. The Passage, which sold for $1.75 mil, is the first in a trilogy of stories about a medical experiment that creates vampires. It's due out June 8.

Publishers lined up to bid for Dracula: The Un-Dead by Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew, Dacre Stoker, and screenwriter Ian Holt (Dutton, $26.95), which was released Oct. 13. The novel, which reportedly sold for more than $1 mil, is a terrific and very bloody reimagining of Bram Stoker's classic novel. Set 25 years after Dracula's destruction, it features a big cast of characters, including Bram's original heroes and real-life monsters Jack the Ripper and Elizabeth Báthory. A film version already is in the works. (For more about the novel, visit http://go.philly.com/dracula.)

Surprisingly, there is a unifying theme that runs through many of the gazillion recent vampire books and movies: the question of vampires' moral status.

Once we could rely on vamps: They were inherently evil. Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, for one, was a repulsive, ugly, fierce, bloodsucking killing machine. Bram's literary heir, Dacre Stoker, presents a far more sympathetic Dracula.

The creatures in filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain: Book One of The Strain Trilogy (William Morrow, $26.99) sure do awful things, but they're not the spawn of Satan. They are the product of a virus, which is morally neutral.

Vamps are as likely to be lovable heroes in today's stories, especially in the two best-selling book series by Stephanie Meyer and Charlaine Harris.

No one seems more un-vampire-like than the "vegetarian" vamp family in Meyer's Twilight series.

How could anyone take Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson in the film adaptations, for a monster? His swoony, melancholy gaze could melt glaciers.

(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers will release new editions of Meyer's books on Oct. 27: a $7.99 mass-market edition of New Moon and the comprehensive boxed set The Twilight Saga Collection, which is listed at $57.96.)

Barnabas, the conflicted vamp in the '60s soap Dark Shadows, may have been more good than evil, but he was never as nice!

Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series features a handsome nice-guy monster named Bill (played by Stephen Moyer in HBO's adaptation, True Blood). Sookie (Anna Paquin in the show) is incredulous when he introduces himself; Bill is as innocuous a name as you can get.

(Last month, Ace books released the Sookie Stackhouse 8-Copy Boxed Set, which costs $63.92. Earlier this month, Ace also released the new Sookie novel, A Touch of Dead, which sells for $23.95.)

In Meyer's and Harris' fictional worlds, vampirism is no longer a metaphysical curse. It's the name for another kind of person. Vampires can be good or bad.

The best way to understand this huge cultural shift is to read some of the classic vampire tales in editor Otto Penzler's gargantuan, 1,034-page anthology, The Vampire Archives (Vintage Crime, $25). The superb collection features stories by Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Stephen King, not to mention John Keats, Lord Byron, and Goethe. The tome includes the full text of one of the greatest vampire classics, Sheridan Le Fanu's novella, Carmilla.

By their very existence, traditional vampires subvert the Judeo-Christian order, long the foundation of Western culture. They are neither dead nor alive. They can create other vampires (their "children") without procreation. They are powerful predators gripped by an insatiable need to feed off a human's life force or soul.

The vamp craze is part of a larger American fascination with the gothic handed down by the Puritans. It is the flip side, the dark side of our unbounded optimism.

As Peter Straub notes in the introduction to the short-story anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (Library of America, $35), our forebears were terrified that the wild, chaotic power of nature would swallow up their carefully cultivated sense of moral decorum.

That basic fear - that we might lose our individual selves to a malevolent power, whether it be nature, God, the devil, technology, the military, or politics - lies at the heart of the modern horror.

Poe to the Pulps is the first in a brilliant two-volume collection edited by Straub, which concludes with American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now (Library of America, $35). The second work shows the rapid evolution of fictional horror in an era beset by real-life horrors inconceivable a century earlier.

From the sublime we descend to the ridiculous with a growing series of self-help books designed for the undead and other fiendish creatures:

Vampire Seduction Handbook: Have the Most Thrilling Love of Your Life, by Luc Richard Ballion and local author Scott Bowen (Skyhorse Publishing, $12.95); The New Vampire's Handbook: A Guide for the Recently Turned Creature of the Night, by Joe Garden, Janet Ginsburg, et al. (Villard, $14); and the particularly hilarious The Werewolf's Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten, by Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers (Broadway Books, $13.99).

Don't laugh, they might save your life - or help you get a date - should you decide to become a vamp or a werewolf.