One contemporary reviewer scathed the novel, comparing it unfavourably to Marryat's previous works and another vampire text published in the same year—Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Marryat's conception of vampires as medical rather than supernatural has also elicited interest, and critics frequently compare it both to Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872).

[1] Academic Helena Ifill writes that the Female Gothic typified by Ann Radcliffe was no longer relevant to readers at the end of the nineteenth century.

[3] In a January 1898 review, The Speaker wrote that Dracula had inspired The Blood of the Vampire as part of "a wave of imitations by inferior writers".

They also objected to the text's sensationalist elements and criticised Harriet's illegitimate birth as the daughter of a mad scientist and a "voluptuous Creole slave".

H. L. Malchow notes that vampires and mixed-race individuals elicited similar fears from Victorian readers; the ability of both to pass—as human or white-skinned—resulted in anxiety about "pollution of the blood".

[9] [Harriet]: “We had plenty of niggers on the coffee plantation, regular African fellows with woolly heads and blubber lips and yellow whites to their eyes.

[11] Ifill concurs, noting that Harriet's pleasant childhood memories of whipping slaves reflects upon "the morally unwholesome conditions in the Western world".

[12] The Washington Post's literary critic Michael Dirda posits that the novel supplies non-vampiric explanations for the deaths occurring around Harriet, suggesting that she might be a victim of racial prejudice.

Susan Ziegler writes that the supernatural explanation for vampirism in Dracula is dismissed in favour of a medical one, making it an aspect of her race.

Of Carmilla's vampire hunters, two are medical practitioners; Dracula's Van Helsing and Seward are both doctors; and Dr Phillips influences Harriet's decision to kill herself.

[20] Depledge relates that the medical profession is tied to the female vampires of each text because of the Victorian diagnosis of hysteria—a condition of excess emotionality in women.

To deal with her vampirism, Dr Phillips instructs Harriet to practice self-help and self-reliance; this is similar to the advice given by medical professionals to treat the incurable hysteria.