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distaste for garlic, acute anemic symptoms, and worst of all, mental illness. In combination, these symptoms may have led superstitious and primitive cultures to fear a demonic cause for any mysterious deaths.

Porphyria, as much as it may sound like a perfect storm of symptoms and reasons for the origins of the vampire myth, is a very unlikely candidate. You see, the vampiric fear of sunlight is actually a fairly recent addition to the vampire lore. Even in Stoker's Dracula, the vampire is capable of daylight excursions. It is really the film Nosferatu, by Werner Herzog, that originated the idea that vampires cannot tolerate sunlight. Even though porphyria is present in all racial groups, it really is quite rare, and any person suffering from it in pre-industrial times would be very unlikely to survive for very long.

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LITERATURE

The first stories about vampires appear during the eighteenth century, but it isn't until the Victorians like Byron and Coleridge that the vampire gets a good prose venue. Varney the Vampire is typical of the "penny dreadful" pamphlets that catered to sensationalist fiction. Le Fanu's Camilla is ever so much better, and really focuses on the vampire as a sympathetic character battling its dreadful obsessive compulsion. This is what really turns the literature on its ear, turning the vampire into the hero, instead of a monster. Trust the Romantics to turn things around like that. Bram Stoker's Dracula is the early pinacle of the vampire story. It combines sex, death and blood-blood-blood into a really harrowing tale. Of course it is really the ancient and wise Van Helsing that is the hero of the story. In spite of his haphazard use of transfusions without blood-typing the donors or the recipients which would surely have killed a whole pacel of people faster than Drac could ever do it, his scientific and theologically conscious battle against the devil is fascinating.

The TV series Dark Shadows and the novels by Marilyn Ross about Barnabus Collins in the sixties and seventies, revitalized vampire literature, taking the cue from the Romantics and focusing on the tragic character of the vampire. Ann Rice's vampire novels did much the same with a lot more style and grace. Stephen King's Salem's Lot gives us a vampire in the mold of the Nosferatu type.

TWILIGHT OF THE VAMPIRES

The latest literary twist on vampires is the Twlight series by Stephanie Meyers. Isabella Swan falls in love with the tragic Edward Cullen.

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