Blood and Bone

For two centuries the vampire has been the most anatomically detailed monster in fiction - and almost no one has taken its body seriously. This book does.

Blood and Bone is a speculative physiology of the undead: a straight-faced dissection of the great vampires of literature and film, from Polidori's moonlit Lord Ruthven and Le Fanu's Carmilla to Stoker's reflectionless Count, the plague-rat frame of Nosferatu's Orlok, Anne Rice's marble-skinned Lestat, and the crystalline Edward Cullen. Treating each creature as a specimen on the table, it asks how such a body could actually work - how it feeds, how it heals, why sunlight annihilates one vampire and merely inconveniences another - and reconstructs, organ by organ, the impossible biology that fiction never troubled to explain.

Across chapters on circulation without a heartbeat, venom and viral transformation, corpse-skin and crystalline flesh, it assembles a comparative natural history of creatures that were never alive: a full taxonomy of the undead, complete with charts, tables, and a programme of original anatomical plates in the tradition of Vesalius and Gray.

Affectionate, rigorous, and gleefully macabre, Blood and Bone is popular science for monsters - a field guide to the anatomy of the imagination, for readers of gothic fiction, horror cinema, pop-culture criticism, and speculative biology alike.