Heeding the call of our previous instalment,1 Álvaro Arango Vallejo contacted me about another non-fiction vampire book coming out soon: his own.2
November 30, 2026
Historia literaria del vampiro en Hispanoamérica (siglos XIX–XX) / Álvaro Arango Vallejo
Book description
This study offers the first comprehensive exploration of the vampire in Latin American literature. Whether appearing as clerics, dictators, slaveholders, psychiatric patients, or even killer plants, the diverse manifestations of the vampire in Latin American literature serve as a coded testament to the region’s collective fears, discursive conflicts, and sociocultural tensions over nearly two centuries.
Comment
In a follow-up email to me, Arango Vallejo added:
This study offers the first systematic overview of the largely unexplored history of the vampire in Spanish American literature, showing how it has embodied the region’s collective fears and sociocultural tensions for nearly two centuries.
Across the more than sixty texts that make up the corpus under analysis, the motif takes the form of clerics, dictators, slave owners, corporations, psychiatric patients, killer plants, and more, reflecting from ideological conflicts and civil wars in the continent’s early postcolonial history to neocolonial interventions and more recent authoritarian regimes.
In this sense, the study addresses a double critical gap. On the one hand, it brings visibility to a series of texts that have thus far been excluded from the global vampire canon, contributing to overcoming the Anglophone emphasis of Vampire Studies. On the other, it reclaims the place of the motif within Hispanic philologies, presenting a rich and fertile literary tradition, as well as a coded archive of the most significant discursive conflicts in the region’s postcolonial history.3
I think it’s great to explore various cultural dimensions of the vampire. Off the top of my head, the closest book I can think of in this milieu is Abigail Lee Six’s 2019 book, Spanish Vampire Fiction since 1900: Blood Relations. However, that’s a similarity in language more than culture, per se.
There will also be an open access version if you don’t want to pay 119,95 € for the hardcover edition.
- Anthony Hogg, “Upcoming Books #1: The Revival,” News, Vampire Studies Association, September 11, 2026, https://vampirestudies.org/2026/09/11/upcoming-books-1-the-revival/. ↩︎
- Arango Vallejo, email message to the author, September 14, 2026. ↩︎
- Arango Vallejo, email message to the author, September 29, 2026. ↩︎
