Wit & Attitude Quote by Brian Lumley

Lumley draws a line in the sand, and it is staked through the heart of a whole pop-cultural trend. His shrug at "other vampire stories" isn’t false modesty; it’s a deliberate refusal to join the genre’s book club, a way of asserting artistic sovereignty. He’s not interested in the vampire as a mirror for our longing, loneliness, or erotic shame. He wants the vampire as a problem: predatory, contaminating, fundamentally other.

The key move is the phrase "romantic vampires anyway" - that dismissive "anyway" carries an entire critique. Lumley is pushing back against the soft-focus reinvention of the vampire into a charismatic antihero, a creature who seduces audiences into rooting for the predator. His insistence that "the vampire is simply an evil monster" is less a taxonomy than an ethic: horror should horrify. If the monster becomes boyfriend material, the genre loses its teeth, and the reader loses a useful kind of fear.

Context matters. Lumley comes out of a British horror lineage that treats the supernatural as invasive and corrosive, closer to plague than poetry. His own work (notably the Necroscope mythos) leans into body horror and cosmic dread, where vampirism is closer to parasitism than romance. The subtext is a defense of boundaries: between victim and aggressor, between dread and desire, between horror as confrontation and horror as comfort.