Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Series editor’s preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the most Gothic of acts – suicide in generic context
- 1 Scottish revenants: Caledonian fatality in Thomas Percy’s Reliques
- 2 Male and female Werthers: Romanticism and Gothic suicide
- 3 ‘The supposed incipiency of mental disease’: guilt, regret and suicide in three ghost stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
- 4 ‘The body of a self-destroyer’: suicide and the self in the fin-de-siècle Gothic
- 5 ‘To be mistress of her own fate’: suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard Marsh
- 6 Suicide as justice? The self-destroying Gothic villain in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood
- 7 Gothic influences: darkness and suicide in the work of Patricia Highsmith
- 8 Better not to have been: Thomas Ligotti and the ‘suicide’ of the human race
- 9 Vampire suicide
- 10 Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and culture
- 11 ‘I will abandon this body and take to the air’: the suicide at the heart of Dear Esther
- Index
9 - Vampire suicide
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2025
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Series editor’s preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the most Gothic of acts – suicide in generic context
- 1 Scottish revenants: Caledonian fatality in Thomas Percy’s Reliques
- 2 Male and female Werthers: Romanticism and Gothic suicide
- 3 ‘The supposed incipiency of mental disease’: guilt, regret and suicide in three ghost stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
- 4 ‘The body of a self-destroyer’: suicide and the self in the fin-de-siècle Gothic
- 5 ‘To be mistress of her own fate’: suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard Marsh
- 6 Suicide as justice? The self-destroying Gothic villain in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood
- 7 Gothic influences: darkness and suicide in the work of Patricia Highsmith
- 8 Better not to have been: Thomas Ligotti and the ‘suicide’ of the human race
- 9 Vampire suicide
- 10 Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and culture
- 11 ‘I will abandon this body and take to the air’: the suicide at the heart of Dear Esther
- Index
Summary
Among the more counterintuitive tropes of the vampire genre is the propensity of vampires to attempt suicide (often successfully). This chapter focuses on three motivations for vampire suicide – vampire guilt, vampire martyrdom and vampire ennui. In relation to guilt, this chapter will discuss Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, James Malcolm Rymer’s novel Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood and Park Chan-wook’s 2009 film Thirst. Vampire martyrdom will be discussed in relation to David Slade’s 2007 American horror movie 30 Days of Night, based on Steve Niles’s 2002 graphic novel, and Darla in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, Angel . As for vampire ennui, the characters of Godric (Allan Hyde) in HBO's True Blood and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) in Jim Jarmusch's 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive will provide examples. After noting the motivations for vampire suicide in Gothic narrative, the emphasis of the chapter will be on the ways in which vampire suicidal tendencies constitute a half-hearted attempt to recuperate the vampire genre from charges of immorality through a strategy of inversion.
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- Suicide and the Gothic , pp. 139 - 159Publisher: Manchester University PressFirst published in: 2025
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