True Vampires: Blood-Sucking Killers Past and Present Paperback – October 1, 2003 by Sondra London
 
From Booklist
To begin with, London considers what a vampire is. Precise definitions are elusive, it seems, but given blood drinkers, flesh eaters, corpse fuckers, and their deeds that London efficiently presents, so what? She nicely balances old and new ghouls, reviewing the cases of Vlad Tepes, inspiration for Dracula, and fellow Transylvanian Countess Bathory, who bathed in blood rather than consumed it. Among contemporaries, London notes six-foot-eight aspiring rapper Big Lurch, arrested in L.A. in 2002, "buck naked, loping down South Figueroa[,] . . . his mumbling mouth slathered with blood, raw gore streaking down" his front. He was fresh from dispatching his girlfriend, having pulled out her right lung for a chew in the process; a "medical examination found human flesh and blood in the rangy rapper's stomach." Since London also discusses noncriminal, self-styled vampires and their motivations and exploits, perhaps it's wrong to view this as just a particularly bloody true-crime compendium. Still, gore is probably the main attraction of this exposure of some of "our most primordial fears." Mike Tribby
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