October 2024 List of the Month: Best Vampire and Werewolf Fiction

Hello Everyone! It's October again, and that means it's spooky season! In honor of the time of year our List of the Month is devoted to the Best Vampire & Werewolf Fiction.

Each participant may vote on ten titles (and add other, non-weighted titles). Please feel free to add notes, explaining your choice. Please only downvote titles which don't fit the theme of the list.

For a complete list of topics covered so far in our project, please see the new section for Lists of the Month on the Zeitgeist page

We would welcome suggestions for future lists. Please add them here, and we will keep them in mind, going forward.

>1 AbigailAdams26: I love participating in these lists, so thank you for providing such interesting lenses through which to see the books I've read.

A few ideas for future lists:

Favorite Books Read as a Child
- pick an age and anything read before that is fair game

Books That Changed Your Life
- potentially irresistible bait to the overzealous downvoters, but might be a fun topic anyway

Favorite Books with a ____ Cover
- pick a color, an object, words only, etc.

Favorite Books in Translation
- if titles have several translations, preferred versions could be explained by those voting for them

Favorite Tropey Reads
- could pick a specific trope, but it might also be fun to let voters do Trope Bingo, where they pick one book for a favorite trope up to 5 or 10 titles/tropes
- TVTropes.org might be a good resource to link to if voters aren't sure where to start

And I'm always hunting for more books with Death or the Fae/Sidhe/Folklore beings as characters, so I would love to see others' recommendations for those. Same for any hidden gems in fantasy and sci-fi, though I don't know how you'd classify "hidden gem" so voters would feel confident when choosing their titles.

>2 slimikin: And I'm always hunting for more books with Death or the Fae/Sidhe/Folklore beings as characters, so I would love to see others' recommendations for those.

https://www.librarything.com/list/320/all/Recommended-Faerie-books
https://www.librarything.com/list/320/paradoxosalpha/Recommended-Faerie-books

>2 slimikin: Great ideas! I especially like the idea of books in translation, especially if people give their favorite translations of classics that have been translated multiple times.

>4 Charon07: Might be a good idea to explicitly exclude scriptures of any kind as that could degenerate into edit wars...

>5 Maddz:
Excluding "scriptures of any kind" is more easily said than done. Taken literally, "scriptures" are just "writings" after all, and the holiness of any writ is very much in the mind of the reader.

>3 paradoxosalpha: Thanks! Every time I think I have a fair idea of what's on this site, I discover MOAR.

>4 Charon07: Thanks! And I love seeing the different sorts of translations people choose for their classics, too---especially since for many classics these days, you can tailor your type of translation to the type of reader you are. But translations in general are fascinating. I read a lot of picture books in translation, and it's not just the words that are different from those published in my language and culture: the art is different in style; the ideas get a slightly different focus; the characters engage emotionally and intellectually in a different way. It's so cool!

Why has nobody added Mated to My Sexy Professor: He Is A Werewolf (Werewolf Professor Student Age Gap Romance Book 1)?!

Just kidding. We found that--the tip of the iceberg in such things--when looking for good (bad) examples of bibliographic data for our import redesign.

Hunter's Moon by Sarah M. Awa

>2 slimikin: I'm so glad you've been enjoying the lists! Thank you for these suggestions, I will definitely keep them in mind.