In Fanged and Fabulous by Michelle Rowen, I'm confused. How is it vampires can move around in the sunlight?

Question

Some can eat real food. Some can't drink blood. Is the author making up the rules as she goes along? How can anyone fall in love with someone (vampire) who drinks your blood, drains you and leaves you for dead? Is it me or was this story just too, too far out!

Answer 1

I think those vampires wear SPF 45 to not be damaged by the sunlight.

Answer 2

The wonderful thing about vampires is that they're fiction, based off myths long ago set up by people in cultures very different from ours. For a very long time, the only criteria for a vampire was that it was a parasite that sucked some sort of energy (blood or whatever) from humans. If you do a Google search on them, you'll see just how varied vampires are. The idea of vampires going out in the sunlight is actually getting more popular, as well as not drinking blood. Yea, F&F is out there, but doesn't that make it fun? And some people fall in love with other people because they DRINK your blood...really there was a documentary on it...you can buy it off Itunes.

Answer 3

I haven't read this book, but the idea that sunlight harms vampires is actually quite recent. It doesn't appear in folklore. It doesn't appear in 19th century vampire literature like Sheridan le Fanu's "Carmilla" or Bram Stoker's "Dracula". (Both Carmilla and Dracula were stronger at night and preferred to sleep during the day, but they could and did go out in the sun.)

In fact, it seems that the first example of a vampire being harmed by sunlight is in the 1922 silent film "Nosferatu", and even then it's not clear that the sunlight alone is what kills the vampire.

Later vampire films played up the idea of sunlight being deadly to vampires, and it's become an accepted literary convention. But an author may ignore this convention without being guilty of "making up the rules as she goes along". For centuries no one had the idea that sunlight hurt vampires at all, and there are other modern writers who have vampires that go out during the day. For example, in Whitley Steiber's "The Hunger" (both the novel and the film adaptation) the vampires are not afraid of the sun.

I would agree with you that a vampire that doesn't drink blood is by definition not a true vampire, though. Some stories feature "psychic vampires" or "energy vampires" who drain their victims of life without needing their blood, but you don't call such creatures just plain "vampires".