The Space Vampires
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Space Vampires is a British science fiction horror novel written by author Colin Wilson, and first published in England and the United States by Random House in 1976. This is Wilson's fifty-first book. It is about the remnants of a race of intergalactic vampires who are brought back from outer space and are inadvertently let loose on Earth.
The titular space aliens are energy vampires, as opposed to the familiar stereotypical blood-sucking Earth vampires that suck blood and change into bats. They consume the "life force" by seducing living beings with a deadly kiss and also have the ability to take control of the willing host bodies of their victims. Though initially the aliens' "true" form appears to be a bat-like creature, the creatures are ultimately revealed to be insubstantial energy-beings from a higher dimension. The novel's main protagonist is Captain Olof Carlsen, the commanding officer of the space exploration vehicle which discovered the vampires' spacecraft.
The novel was mildly successful and was translated into many languages including Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian, Dutch and Swedish.
The concept and set-up of the novel was apparently inspired by, and loosely based on, the purported phenomenon and mythologic legend of psychic vampirism.
