Most Read Vampire Books

When seventeen-year-old Isabella "Bella" Swan leaves sunny Phoenix to live with her father in the perpetually rain-soaked town of Forks, Washington, she expects little more than a dull, gray exile. Instead she becomes fascinated by Edward Cullen, a strikingly beautiful and aloof classmate who seems to alternate between saving her life and warning her away from him. As Bella pieces together the truth about Edward and his family, she realizes he is a vampire — one who has chosen to resist human blood, but whose very nature makes loving her dangerous. Their bond deepens into an intense, all-consuming romance, even as Bella learns that not every vampire shares the Cullens' restraint, and that being close to Edward may cost her everything. The first book in Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster Twilight Saga, this is a moody, atmospheric teen romance about desire, danger, and the pull between what we want and what is safe. Told in Bella's earnest first-person voice, it launched a global phenomenon and defined a generation of paranormal romance.

• forbidden love

A young solicitor travels to Transylvania on ordinary business and discovers his client is no ordinary nobleman. When the count relocates to England, a small circle of friends led by the physician Van Helsing must piece together the truth from letters, diaries, and telegrams before it is too late. Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel that defined the modern vampire.

• epistolary

Bella Swan is left devastated when the Cullens leave Forks, and slowly finds comfort in a deepening friendship with Jacob Black — who carries supernatural secrets of his own. As she's drawn back into a dangerous hidden world, Bella faces an ancient vampire authority. The second book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.

• love triangle
• forbidden love

Reunited with Edward, Bella is torn between him and her bond with Jacob as a wave of mysterious killings in Seattle signals a growing danger aimed at her. Old enemies must form an uneasy alliance to protect her. The third book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.

• love triangle
• forbidden love
• rivals

The fourth and final book of Stephenie Meyer's original Twilight Saga brings Bella and Edward's story to its climax. Long-awaited choices arrive with unexpected consequences that test the Cullen family, the Quileute wolves, and the fragile peace between them — until the ancient Volturi threaten everyone Bella loves.

• forbidden love
• sacrifice

Oraya is the only human in a court of vampires — the adopted daughter of the Nightborn king — and to stop being prey she enters the Kejari, a lethal once-a-century tournament held by the goddess of death, allying with a rival competitor whose agenda could destroy her.

• enemies to lovers
• slow burn
• found family
• morally grey

V.E. Schwab's sweeping, sapphic vampire saga, spanning five centuries and three continents. In 1532 Spain, María escapes a suffocating marriage into a monstrous freedom; in 1820s London, exiled Charlotte learns she can love as she chooses; in present-day Boston, Alice wakes after a one-night stand unable to bear sunlight, with new fangs and a thirst she can't explain. As their lives intertwine across time, it becomes a lush, furious meditation on immortality, hunger, and the women who make us.

• multiple povs
• morally grey
• forbidden love
• betrayal

In a remote castle in the forests of Styria, the lonely young Laura takes in a beautiful, secretive guest named Carmilla — and finds herself both captivated by and afraid of her intense affection. As Carmilla's presence grows, women in the countryside sicken and die, and Laura falls mysteriously ill. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 Gothic novella predates Dracula and helped define vampire fiction.

• forbidden love

A full-length companion to Twilight that retells the first novel from Edward Cullen's perspective. Edward's restraint, torment, and century of loneliness reframe the romance, exposing the constant danger his vampire nature poses to Bella. Published in 2020 after years of anticipation.

• forbidden love
• slow burn

Patricia Campbell's life in a 1990s suburb of Charleston has narrowed to carpools, casseroles and a difficult mother-in-law — until a charming newcomer moves into the Old Village, children start disappearing across town, and her true-crime book club becomes the only people who will believe her. A funny, gruesome Southern horror novel about the women nobody listens to.

• found family
• betrayal

Twenty-seven years after the last sunrise, vampires rule the long night and the holy Silver Order that once held them back is broken. Gabriel de León — half man, half monster, and the last silversaint alive — is a prisoner of the creatures he swore to destroy, and they want his story. What he gives them runs from his boyhood in Nordlund to the road that led him to the Holy Grail, humanity's final hope of calling back the sun.

• quest
• morally grey
• dual timeline
• anti hero

When historian Diana Bishop discovers a magical manuscript, she's drawn into a hidden world of witches, vampires, and daemons. Her unexpected connection with the enigmatic vampire Matthew Clairmont ignites an ancient conflict, forcing them to confront dangerous secrets and forbidden feelings. This is the start of a magical romance where history and magic collide.

• forbidden love
• chosen one

Constanta is dying in the wreckage of her village when a stranger offers her eternity instead of a grave. Remade as the first bride of a vampire lord she pointedly never names, she spends centuries at his side as he draws two more consorts into the marriage: Magdalena, a cunning aristocrat, and Alexi, a starving artist. Written as one long letter from Constanta to the husband who made her, S.T. Gibson's gothic reimagining of Dracula's brides is less a vampire adventure than an anatomy of an abusive marriage — and of what it costs to break a bond forged in blood.

• epistolary
• morally grey
• forbidden love
• revenge

Zoey Redbird's life takes a dramatic turn when she's Marked by the vampyre Goddess, Nyx. She must now attend the House of Night, a school for fledglings, and learn to survive the Change into an adult vampire. With new friends by her side, Zoey needs to find the strength to accept her destiny.

• chosen one
• coming of age
• fish out of water

Robert Neville is the last man on Earth, or so he thinks. Each night, the infected hunt him, and by day, he struggles to survive in a world that has become a graveyard. He must find a way to fight back against the plague that has turned humanity into monsters, or he will be the next to fall.

• survival
• reluctant hero

In 1912 Montana, a Lutheran pastor transcribes the nightly confession of Good Stab, a Blackfeet man turned vampire, whose impossible story circles a real massacre of his people and the patient vengeance it set loose. Framed as an unearthed diary, Stephen Graham Jones's historical horror epic is a vampire tale about genocide, memory, and survival.

• revenge
• dual timeline
• epistolary

A Victorian London botanist who poisons unsavory men discovers her newest target is not the ordinary man he seems, in the first book of I.V. Ophelia's Gothic Poisoner trilogy.

• enemies to lovers
• morally grey
• anti hero
• secret identity

In the remote Alaskan town of Deadhart, a fifteen-year-old boy is found dead, his throat torn out and his body drained of blood. Suspicion falls immediately on the Colony — a reclusive group of vampires who have lived on the town's fringes for generations, and who were blamed for a nearly identical killing twenty-five years earlier. Detective Barbara Atkins arrives from the Forensic Vampyr Anthropology Department to determine whether the Colony is truly responsible or being scapegoated. In a world where vampire colonies are protected by law — and can only be culled if proven a threat to human life — the stakes of her verdict are enormous. Teaming up with Jenson Tucker, the town's disgraced former sheriff, Atkins works against mounting hostility, old grievances, and a rising body count. As a brutal storm threatens to cut Deadhart off from the outside world, the tension between the townspeople and the Colony edges toward violence. C.J. Tudor reworks vampire mythology into a taut, atmospheric murder mystery about prejudice, fear of the outsider, and who the real monsters are.

Harlow Carrenwell's kiss is lethal. As the youngest daughter of Lunameade's magical founding family, her poisoned lips make her her parents' most effective assassin — and, masked as the vigilante the city calls the Poison Vixen, her own weapon against the men who abuse Lunameade's women. Then a mark survives her kiss, and the one man immune to her poison turns out to be Henry Havenwood, her newly arranged betrothed, who now knows exactly what she does after dark. A standalone dark enemies-to-lovers romantasy told in dual point of view.

• enemies to lovers
• marriage of convenience
• forced proximity
• morally grey

Sloane Parker, dreading her birthday and numb in a marriage to a serial cheater, lets her glamorous best friend Naomi whisk her away for a weekend getaway. But a wild night out with magnetic strangers ends with the two friends changed forever — with eternal, bloody consequences. Rachel Harrison's So Thirsty is a seductive, darkly funny vampire novel about friendship, dissatisfaction, and hunger of every kind.

Elena Gilbert thought she knew love, but her world is turned upside down when she falls for a vampire. The complication? His dangerous brother is also drawn to her, creating a deadly love triangle. As secrets and betrayals surface, Elena must decide if she can survive the darkness that surrounds her.

• love triangle
• forbidden love
• betrayal

Book two of The Passage trilogy. A century after a government experiment loosed a viral plague on America, a small band of survivors led by the enigmatic Amy takes the fight to the virals, hunting the twelve original carriers in their hives. Cronin braids the first days of the collapse together with the war that follows, ninety-five years on.

• survival
• multiple povs
• dual timeline
• morally grey

Newly promoted Chicago detective Celine Brennan lands a case of gruesome murders nobody has been able to solve — and keeps getting distracted by a suspicious new club in town and the man she keeps running into. Zavier Lockwood is three hundred years old, thoroughly bored, and has been quietly culling the worst of Chicago for sport, until his obsession with Celine becomes more tempting than killing. Book one of the Total Chaos series: a darkly comic paranormal romance about falling for the man whose crimes you are supposed to solve.

• morally grey
• forbidden love
• villain protagonist
• slow burn