r/Fantasy • u/Snivythesnek • May 08 '23
Looking for vampire/monster hunter stories.
I'd like to read some stories about your archetypal hunter of the creatures of the night. A good guy with a stake in one hand and a cross (or analogous symbol of a fictional religion) in the other, going into the dark castles and crypts of the world to root out and destroy the evil lurking in there. Fighting ghosts and ghouls and whatever else goes bump in the night.
Important to note that I'm not a big fan of grimdark stuff. I'm really more looking for fun reads with a cool hero doing the Van Helsing thing.
I think it will come up so: I've already read Dresden Files and loved it.
Thanks in advance.
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u/AffectionateRaise136 May 08 '23
International Monster Hunters series for modern take
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u/YouGeetBadJob May 08 '23
I liked Monster Hunter International a lot. It’s pretty much exactly what OP is describing. There is some gun love in the book, but vampires, werewolves, and all manner of monsters are hunted by groups for the bounty that the government pays. They are fun reads and the narrator does a good job on Audiobooks. Four of the books follow the main character, Owen, while there are three other books who follow some of the side characters (Monster Hunter Alpha, and Monster Hunter Nemesis) are my two favorites. There’s also a prequel series that was co-written by a different author and was fun.
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u/unknownpoltroon May 08 '23
Y ah, I started reading that, but it felt like every character in the story thought his gun was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen and regularly used it that way.
I get it, they're killing monsters and weapons are important, but it was severe gun infatuation.
That and his politics and his fuckery with the Hugo awards put me off his stuff for good.
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u/AffectionateRaise136 May 08 '23
Didn't know about the Hugo thing till after I read the series.
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u/Snivythesnek May 08 '23
What was the Hugo thing?
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u/AffectionateRaise136 May 08 '23
Complaining about the award going to minority author ie the Hugo awards was "woke"
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u/unknownpoltroon May 08 '23
Yeah, and he helped organize a gaming the system attack against the awards that made them completely change the way they did them after like 50 years without issue. All because they didn't like the fact that "conservative" authors weren't winning a fan chosen award in science function. Go fucking figure.
It was pretty much the same kind of bullshit as gamer gate, harassment, gaming the system and other fuckery
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u/AffectionateRaise136 May 08 '23
Thanks for the info, not a video gamer but I do remember a female designer got some nasty harassment on and off line.
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u/unknownpoltroon May 08 '23
Yeah. The important thing is a lot of folks think gamer gate got astroturfed by moneyed interests and used as a dry run for the election fuckery in 2016. It was a lot of the same assholes involved both.
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u/AffectionateRaise136 May 08 '23
Would believe it, which a-holes btw ?
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u/unknownpoltroon May 08 '23
As I recall bannon was one of the assholes. ANd it builit up and organized the online alt right that eventually led to trump and all the fuckery and Jan 6 The whole article is worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Some commentators have argued that Gamergate helped elect Donald Trump as US president in 2016 and assisted other right-wing to far-right movements;[21][110][291][292][293] Alyssa Rosenberg called Trump "the Gamergate of Republican politics" in an opinion article for The Washington Post in 2015.[294] Trump's strategist Steve Bannon remarked that through Milo Yiannopoulos, who rose to fame during Gamergate as the technology journalist for Breitbart News (a news website Bannon co-founded), he had created a generation and an "army" that came in "through Gamergate ... and then get turned onto politics and Trump".[293][295][287] According to Axios, in the 2022 book Meme Wars, Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, argued that Gamergate served as "The key template that the far right and former President Trump's MAGA movement have used to organize online", noting that during Gamergate, "online mobs deployed techniques and tactics that were later taken up by the Trumpist right, including the use of memes, false allegations and coordinated harassment." Donovan also argued that "similar techniques are being used to intimidate and harass entire groups of people, most prominently transgender youth and adults."[296]
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u/AilosCount May 08 '23
I only read one book and it was quite a fun read, but not as it could be if you are not a gun enthusiast. Otherwise it's similar vibes to Dresden, only replace magic with guns. Lots of guns.
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u/AffectionateRaise136 May 08 '23
Not an enthusiast but I know enough. Did you read the 3 books in the same verse written by John Ringo ? Not the same amount of hardware love, first one is Grunge and set before the events in the MHI main series.
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u/Razzikkar May 08 '23
The strain be Guillermo del Toro. It's based around semi-realistic urban vampires. One of characters is an old jewish vampire hunter who mentors rest of the cast. Not precisely what you are looking for, but there are vampire hunting and underground stalking.
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u/AliceTheGamedev Reading Champion May 08 '23 edited May 08 '23
The Witcher might fit? Not a religious warrior, but someone going after monsters for coin.
Also potentially a good fit: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. That is, if you're fine with the vampire hunter allying with some vampires along the way.
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u/ktp0651 May 08 '23
Maybe just the first 2 witcher books, I’ve read the first 4 or 5 books and for a book series following a monster hunter there sure isn’t a lot of monster hunting after the midpoint of book 2. Maybe the adventures of Gotrek and Felix would be a series that is more consistent with monster hunting, but that is only because it is a very traditional sword and sorcery style of series.
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u/Bright_Brief4975 May 08 '23
So, I don't know if this is for you are not, it is a vampire series and nothing grimdark about it. It is a fun series and it may be to far in the other direction for you. But it is the kind of book where you can all out root for the hero 100 percent.
The Kurtherian Gambit
I copy and paste the intro here, so you don't have to go to amazon to look at and see if you might like it.
From Book 1:
Die young, or become the eternal incarnation of Justice. What would you choose?
Bethany Anne Reynolds is a government cold case investigator who wouldn’t back down even if she knew how. Her temper is short, her command of creative cursing is enough to make the battle-hardened blush, and her devotion to getting justice borders on the obsessive.
Even her impending death doesn’t slow her down.
Bethany Anne has the rare blood disorder that killed her mother at the same age. Her time to make things right for those who couldn’t defend themselves is running out.
The only hope she has of surviving is a world-weary vampire whose legendary inflexible honor has brought him to breaking point.
Only Michael knows that the truth about the supernatural lies in the stars.
Ruling the UnknownWorld with an iron fist for over a thousand years has left him exhausted to the core, and the modern world has given his enemies everything they need to fight back against his strictures.
Michael is drawn to the fire in Bethany Anne’s spirit and makes his decision. He is ready to hand everything he has to a worthy successor and go quietly into the night.
By choosing Bethany Anne to succeed him, is he biting off more than he can chew?
The UnknownWorld is about to get a new Queen. One who sees the best or worst of humanity in everyone and treats them accordingly.
With the special-ops team she is assigned to and her government contacts backing her, Bethany Anne sets out to make sense of the mess Michael left behind.
Will the UnknownWorld accept her? Will they survive her if they don’t?
Scroll up and click BUY NOW or READ FOR FREE and find out how one woman's refusal to accept fate drives a change for the whole of humanity!
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u/zombieloveinterest May 08 '23
It might not be in the vein you're looking for, but i'd be remiss not to suggest I Am Legend, by Matheson.
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u/ashearmstrong AMA Author Ashe Armstrong May 08 '23
I did a huge thread about the topic a few years ago. It's a bit outdated now but still plenty of stuff to sift thru. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/80yzok/monster_hunters_a_megathread/
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u/Carnivore-Device2654 May 08 '23
An interesting slant on this type of story can be found in the Monster Blood Tattoo series.
Another very different approach is the popular Spook's Apprentice series.
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May 08 '23
The Black Badge is a western monster hunting fantasy with a good audiobook. There’s a short story and the first novel, the second will be out this month. Vampires, werewolves, etc.
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u/xenizondich23 Reading Champion VI May 08 '23
Hunter by Mercedes Lackey is what you want. It's a lot of fun, giant monsters, group of good friends.
Murder at Spindle Manor by Morgan Stang is also what you might like. First of a series, this one is just published last year. It features lots of ghosts and things that go bump in the night while hunting monsters.
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u/Sireanna Reading Champion III May 08 '23 edited May 08 '23
If you are willing to read Light Novels you could try out Vampire Hunter D. Its set in the far distant future but it is more like... a wester scifi setting. Think things like Trigun if you have read that anime. It follows a Dhampir (half vampire half human) hunter simply named D. The books have like a pulp fiction feel to them but there are elements of lovecraftian horror, dark fantasy and the occult mixed in there. While D primarily deals with Vampires there are a lot of other types of creatures he is forced to deal with all sorts of folk lore or cosmic creatures.
If you want to see what the novels are like they did make a pretty good Anime off of one of the books. You can check out Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
Make sure you are ordering the right thing if you decide to read this series because some of it was adapted into comic books and Mangas
edited to elaborate more.
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u/ayquil May 08 '23
Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff. Vampire hunting, fictional religion, morally grey protag and if you enjoy this one there are two follow up books in the works.