Hollywood gothic

The black-caped vampire is one of the most recognisable figures in modern culture. Most people can list his habits without prompting. He sleeps in a coffin by day and rises at dusk to feed on the living.

He turns into a bat, a wolf or mist, and a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight can destroy him. Few fictional characters are as familiar, and the book compares his recognition to that of Santa Claus.

David J. Skal sets out to trace how this figure came to be so widespread. He follows the archetypal vampire from a literary oddity in Victorian fiction to a movie idol and then to a cultural commodity, a path he presents as relentless.

This is non-fiction cultural history, a survey of a single icon across the decades. Skal looks past the popular surface of the Dracula image to see what the prince of darkness reveals about the people who keep retelling him.

It suits readers curious about horror film, the origins of the vampire legend and the way a monster becomes a brand. The approach is that of an excursion through a figure's life, moving from page to screen to the marketplace.