There’s no contesting it: we live in the heyday of the vampire.  From Anne Rice’s sexy, brooding Louis in Interview with the Vampire to Stephenie Meyer’s sexy, brooding Edward in Twilight, the reading public has been bombarded for the last thirty years with the un-dead in every incarnation and permutation imaginable. We’ve seen vampire villains, vampire heroes, vampire anti-heroes, vampire slayers, vampire world-conquerors, vampires in ancient China, fat Southern vampires, teen vampires, child vampires, vampire superheroes, and, in at least one instance, a vampire Pomeranian. Big screen Hollywood extravaganzas continue to hover into view in local multiplexes, and vampire-themed romance and science fiction novels roll off the presses every month in a seemingly unending supply.

So it seems only fitting to doff our caps today to the man who started it all (and no, we’re not talking about poor wretched Doctor Polidori, who can continue to rest in peace). Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker, the Irish-born (in 1847) journalist, critic, and theater manager who in 1897 gave the world Dracula. “Time is on my side” the fiendish Count says at one point in that novel (which is far more entertaining than you might recall and well worth a celebratory re-read), and it certainly has been: ‘Dracula’ as a literary icon has entered the pantheon of instantly-recognizable figures such as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A new hardcover edition of Dracula is in bookstores now (as well as its very first Stoker family-authorized sequel!), a vampire series is the hit of HBO, and a new Dracula movie is in the works – and we owe it all to Stoker, who had the stroke of genius to bring these creatures of musty old folklore into the light of the present day and set them loose on modern science.

By one of those hair-raising coincidences that so bedevil the literary world, this is also the birth-date of Vlad Tepes, the big-nosed and utterly ruthless Romanian warlord known to history as “the Impaler.” But at Open Letters we’re peaceful folk, so we’re going to let him rest in peace too.

 Another full-to-brimming issue of Open Letters Monthly goes ‘live’ for October, and it abounds with a surprising variety of romances! Sharon Fulton examines the reading public’s erotic fascination with vampires Band of the Hand movies

buy The Fly

; Karen Vanuska tries to anatomize America’s ever-troubled passion for so-called ‘Southern’ fiction; Steve Donoghue heads Down South too, rooting around in that region’s love of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; John Rodwan, Jr. shows us a Christopher Hitchens in love with the sound of his own voice

No Mercy the movie

. Political Editor Greg Waldmann turns in an epic dissection of Barack Obama

Uncle Donald’s Ants trailer

Jake’s Booty Call dvd

, the ideological paramour of so many voters young and old; Kathleen Smith looks at the torrid relationship between marketing and the vox populi

• Me, Myself & Irene trailer

; both Lianne Habinek and Steve Donoghue plumb the depths of Shakespeare, displaying and deconstructing the love critics have of theorizing about the Bard; and Hugh Seames reviews the latest book about that most romantic of cities, Venice. Add to all that a poem by Andrea Zanzotto (translated by Wayne Chambliss) and a photo by Wes Thomas, and you have a lovely bon-bon of an issue to consume!