Stephen Jones. The Mammoth Book of Vampires. London, Robinson, 2004.

THE UNDEAD... Nosferatu... Children of the Night... Call them what you will, what they all have in common is a need to suck the life-force from the living to prolong their own unnatural existence and propagate. For the classic vampire, the blood is the life. However, in recent years many novels and short stories have elected to show the vampire in a somewhat different light – as a sympathetic, misunderstood character, a victim of its own affliction; or as a creature that feeds upon the human psyche or bodily fluids other than blood (thus enhancing the vampire’s frequent identification with a dark sexuality). All these approaches are, of course,perfectly valid, and some have even produced modern classics of the genre.