In this interesting post Dina Khapaeva posits that the contemporary fascination with the vampire represents a "radical rejection of humanity" and the emergence of a "rising cult of Death." The analysis includes some Russian texts that I'm not yet familiar with, but that sound really intriguing, The Night Watch by Sergei Lukianenko (1999) and Empire V (2006) by Viktor Pelevin, the latter of which, unfortunately, does not seem to be translated into English at this point. Khapaeva argues that contemporary vampires challenge "human exceptionality" by privileging the vampire and showing humans to be just another link in the vampire's food chain. I don't agree with the reading of Bella's unexceptional nature in Twilight. Edward doesn't simply desire Bella because of the smell of her blood; he also cannot read her mind, and it is this self-containment that becomes Bella's special trait as a vampire. One could say that this trait defines her essential humanity and is carried over into her life as a vampire. She is not a type of cattle, but individual and exceptional. It this sense that she is actually special and the desire of the reader to also be exceptional that is arguably the main draw of the novels. Khapaeva also doesn't look at some related and important elements in contemporary vampire fiction: the apocalyptic themes of novels like Justin Cronin's The Passage (2010) and Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain (2009) and The Fall (2010). Emily Collette Wilkinson has also pointed very effectively to an exploration of ethics in many contemporary vampire narratives, including Twilight with its "vegetarian" vampires and Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire mysteries. To this list I would add Susan Hubbard's Ethical Vampire series, which is also a coming of age story, another focus of Khapaeva. Hubbard's narrative, explores the nature of humanity, but by now means rejects it. Neither does the BBC series, Being Human, whose three characters, a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost, all attempt, like Harris's vampires to assimilate into human life. Khapaeva's ideas are compelling, but I think the range of vampire narrative is too broad at this point to be encompassed within one frame.