Yarbro's picture of society is clearly summarized in the most popular of her works, Hotel Transylvania, the first novel of the vampire series featuring the elegant and learned Count Ragoczy Saint-Germain. The human beings, and especially the males among them, are the cause of the bloodshed and suffering throughout the novel, and by extension, since the series ranges, in order of publication, through Renaissance Florence, Nero's Rome, Jenghiz Khan's China, and Nazi Germany, with other stops added in each of the novels, they are the cause of suffering through all of history and on every continent. Compared to the slaughters that have been perpetrated by human beings, the vampires of the earth seem almost harmless, and that is in fact the situation in these works.

The Count, who has put his many centuries to good use academically, is more intelligent and sensitive than ninety per cent...