Donald Clarke: Time for vampires to come out of the twilight again

If, like me, you're a revolting old git, then you will occasionally find yourself taken aback to hear some adult tell you they "grew up" with the Harry Potter books. Well, the first volume was published 18 years ago. So you'd better get used to the idea. Indeed, we are now at the stage where some adults have "grown up" with the stories that were dragged in Potter's wake. This week it emerged that, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first Twilight book, Stephenie Meyer, creator of that series, would be issuing a reimagining of the first book, in which the genders of the two main characters are switched. "It really is the same story because it's just a love story," she said.

These stories have been around for 10 years? We must be due the diamond anniversary of Girls Aloud any time soon.

Meyer's ideas for reinvention are cunning. The Twilight books and the films they inspire have always attracted undue degrees of bile from teenage boys (and teenage men) in online gutters. The stunningly unamusing Golden Raspberry Awards – "honouring" the worst films of the year – have nominated successive Twilight movies.

Telling criticism

More telling criticism has focused on the series’ alleged allegorical promotion of celibacy. The opening episodes find sulky Bella Swann (played by lovely Kristen Stewart in the films) longing to become a vampire like enigmatic Edward Cullen (even lovelier Robert Pattinson), but being dissuaded until she is old enough and responsible enough – 218 sounds about right – to understand the responsibilities of being undead.

Remind yourself that the first book is largely based on Pride and Prejudice and you will begin to understand how shallow such objections are. This is an old, old trope. Meyer's prose is not as sound as that of JK Rowling, master of Potter, or Suzanne Collins, creator of The Hunger Games, but her gift for wrapping prehistoric narratives in attractive pop-cultural packages earns her a place alongside the Young Adult Titans of the age. Patronising fatheads – almost all of them bros – tend to wearily admit that they "suppose it's nice that kids are reading anything, even this". Earlier fatheads once said the same sorts of things about E Nesbit, Louisa May Alcott and Hugh Lofting.

The news that a decade has passed since Bella and Edward first caught each other’s eyes kicks up another mystery worth pondering. What is going on with the current, apparently unstoppable passion for vampires?

No, it is not enough to say that such beasts have been around in fiction for centuries. Yes, a craze for vampire stories emerged as long ago as the 1720s. Later in the 18th century, such immortals as Goethe and Robert Southey got on board. Yes, the enthusiasm for gothic literature that stretched across the 19th century was particularly welcoming to the vampire.

There has, however, never been such a sustained period of interest in vampire fiction as the one we are living through now. It does not just sweep up horror enthusiasts. It involves fans of romantic literature and aficionados of independent cinema. There is a vampire for everyone.

Anne Rice, whose Vampire chronicles began with Interview with a Vampire in 1976, now seems like a John the Baptist for the new undead. The current craze really got into its stride with the arrival on TV of the inventive, post-modern, pop-feminist Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997. Charlaine Harris's The Southern Vampire Mysteries became True Blood a decade later, by which point Twilight was on the rise. Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In was among the most acclaimed films of 2008. Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive won fans in 2013. Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – which sets its female vampire loose in a heightened version of contemporary Iran – will figure in many "best of" lists at the end of this year.

New vampires

Pick whatever explanation you like, but the rise of the new vampires has something to do with the loosening of social convention, the free availability of sexual imagery and the slackening of religious faith. Here are a set of ancient rules that, when applied in a structured imaginative universe, reinstall the restrictive order that archetypal stories often require.

We would have trouble buying a book about a hip 21st-century kid facing existential trauma at the notion of abandoning virginity. The concept of being similarly troubled by an eternal life taken up with drinking blood is, for all its fantastic absurdity, just that bit easier to accept.

The vampire will, appropriately enough, be with us for eternity.