Doris Lang knew what her fate would be when the vampire lord Count Magnus Lee bit her: an agonizing transformation into one of the undead, doomed to be stalked by her fellow villagers or cursed to become the bride of the unholy creature and face an eternity of torment, driven by the thirst for human blood.

The novel is adapted into a direct-to-video film of the same name in 1985 and a manga series, Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D, in 2007.

Theron Martin of Anime News Network called the novel "a competent vampire-hunting story with enough strong points to balance out its weaknesses" and gave it a B rating.

He praised the setting as a wholly credible world ruled by vampires and grounded in science fiction, rather than fantasy or the supernatural.

However, he called the plotting "fairly rudimentary" and a standard tale of a hero and heroine struggling against colorful opposition coming from different directions, where even the few twists are hardly unique.