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We've always needed our myths and monsters. It's our entertainment. It's also a direct reflection on the pop culture issues of the day. Vampires really took hold when a STD was devestating the populace. Syphilis was rampant (sex can KILL!) and Dracula hit the zeitgest rather well.
Moving forward, the visual media had a field day mining all the old literature and re-energized the field once again. It petered out and fallow for a few years until anoter STD hit the scenes. AIDS was a bitch (sex can KILL!) and the renaissance followed. This time all the media jumped on board and the field expanded and didn't quite die off like before, but most of the new books tried to find different tropes versus the Stoker original.
Then Meyer hit gold by going for the tween market. Worked well. This time though, there's no pop culture zeitgest behind it. All the bandwagon jumpers we're seeing now are just in it for the money and it's killing the market. There's good material out there but it getting swamped by the crap. This will pass but it's a pain until it does.
My biggest beef is the overwhelming amount of titles stuck in the SF&F genre which I don't think belongs and it really pisses me off how many good titles of non vampire/werewolf/fantasy tropes aren't being published because of this crap.
Ahhhhh, patience. This too shall pass.
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