Modern vampires are neither scary or sexy, children's writers complain

Neil Gaiman, the best-selling Gothic children's author, says the latest generation of vampires are not even scary.

He said that he was put off including a vampire in his latest novel because films and novels aimed at teens had spoiled the creature's reputation for fear-mongering.

Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward Cullen in the Twilight film series, plays a character that contradicts traditional vampire characteristics. He is vegetarian and is able to walk around in daylight.

Speaking as he was awarded the CILIP Carnegie medal for The Graveyard Book, Gaiman compared the current glut of vampire characters to an infestation of cockroaches.

"The saddest thing is that it runs the risk of making vampires not scary" he said.

"I like my creatures of the night a little nocturnal. My next big novel was going to have a vampire. Now, I'm probably not. They are everywhere, they're like cockroaches."

Glamorous portrayals of vampires in television shows such as True Blood (based on Charlaine Harris's novels), the Night World series and The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith, and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series have created a generation of "softer" monsters to the dismay of many in the horror fiction community.

Graham Marks, the children's author, told The Independent: "The two things that vampires are supposed to be is scary and sexy, but I don't think the characters in Twilight are either scary or sexy. Meyer took a genre and mixed it up. Other writers jumped on the bandwagon."