Associate Professor Gale Ruthven, a vampire with nearly four hundred years of service at eighty-three colleges and universities, teaches British Romantic poetry at an obscure commuter college somewhere in far West Texas, enjoying an existence of literary research, student papers, and the bare amount of blood-sucking necessary to survive. His chief aggravation is the Regency Romantic poet, Lord Byron, on whom he fed in 1816 and who refuses to play the role of submissive underling.
When a powerful and seductive vampire named Tempest joins the faculty, Ruthven becomes entangled in a dark mystery involving ancient vampire cults in Mexico and the American Southwest, a hippie vampire named Via Medea, grave robbers in Byron's Gothic ancestral estate in Nottinghamshire, and a shadowy vampire associate from Ruthven's early nineteenth-century past—all of which lead him on a wild chase across two continents and to a final showdown in the New Mexico badlands.