This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher René Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this ‘sacred violence’ through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.


C ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 The Vampire, the Scapegoat and the Sacred King 17
3 From Blood Bonds to Brand Loyalties: Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost
Souls and Alan Ball’s True Blood 37
4 ‘Nothing is Real, Everything is Permitted’: The Vampire
and the Politics of Jouissance 59
5 Contagion, Simulation, Capital: From Tru Blood
to New Blood 87
6 Conclusion 103
Bibliography 107
Index 111