Well red: vampires putting the bite on the 20th century

One of the principal pleasures of Kim Newman's new book Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard is the way it manages to graft the Dracula myth on to almost every aspect of popular culture of the last 50 years, including the post-Fab dreariness of former Beatles called John. From Andy Warhol to Apocalypse Now (in Newman's story the original Francis Ford Coppola take on Dracula, one in which a jittery Dennis Hopper plays Renfield and Robert Duvall stands in for Van Helsing and rowing stands in for surfing - "Nosferatu don't scull"), and Saturday Night Fever to Scientology (recast here as the Church of Immortology, naturally), Newman has spliced his vampire story deep into the heart of the late 20th century.

Newman's book - the last of a quartet that has reimagined the last 100 years as the "vampire century" (in Newman's first novel, Dracula's arrival in Britain wasn't quite the damp squib it was in Bram Stoker's original book; the Count ends up marrying Queen Victoria) - is rather appropriately parasitic. It feeds on and mutates so many stories and ideas, both vampire-related and otherwise. In its 400-plus pages Newman turns Raymond Chandler, the idea of vampire pornography, the Balkanisation of post-Soviet Europe, Live Aid and the HBO drama The Wire all to his own ends.

In some ways Newman's series - which, as you may have already gathered, is tremendous fun by the way - is the ultimate example of the flexibility of the vampiric metaphor.

It was ever thus, you might say. Karl Marx used it some years before Stoker's 1897 novel. In Das Kapital he writes: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Ed Milliband missed a trick in his conference speech this week by not quoting that. Think of how many Twilight fans he might have snagged for his party.

Stoker's novel itself has been read as a treatise on the collapse of British imperialism and the British fear of the foreigner. It was one of the then prevalent "invasion" novels, the most famous example perhaps being HG Well's War Of The Worlds, published a year later.

As literary critic Elizabeth Miller once said, "the vampire always embodies the contemporary threat". In the early 1990s Dan Simmons linked vampirism to the Aids virus - an infection transmitted in the blood after all - in his 1992 novel Children Of The Night. On TV more recently Alan Ball played with gay rights ideas in his series True Blood (the first episode of which aired in 2008, just months before California debated Proposition 8, which aimed to ensure that only marriages between men and women would be recognised).

Some vampire tics are more constant of course. The one thing that Stephanie Meyer's Twilight books share with Bram Stoker's is their fixation with sexuality. Vampirism as a metaphor for sex is so constant it hardly needs stating, though it's possible we've seen and read about so many vampire bites that the flashing lights that should immediately begin to strobe every time the metaphor is employed (hello, bodily fluids being exchanged) may have been obscured by its constant - and ultimately obliterating - representation.

Maybe Stephen King was a little guilty of not seeing the kiss for the fangs when he moaned about Meyer's novels the other week, writing them off as "tweenager porn". As well as criticising their literary merit, King, who gave us one of the most repellent -and frightening - vampires in Salem's Lot, said of the Twilight books: "They're really not about vampires and werewolves. They're about how the love of a girl can turn a bad boy good."

But of course you could say that vampire books are never just about vampires. As Kim Newman could tell you, where would the fun in that be?