All Souls : SUCKERS, <i> By Anne Billson (Atheneum: $20; 320 pp.)</i> : LASHER, <i> By Anne Rice (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 418 pp.)</i>

When I first heard of the punk rock group named “Dead Kennedys,” I was appalled. Oh, not the Kennedys! Have they no respect for the dead? Reading the first pages of “Suckers” did something of the same to me. I’ve always looked on the vampire as nature’s unnatural gentleman, a reluctant vector of evil, a stately creature of tragic, solitary grandeur.

And here in Anne Billson’s wicked and vulgar and unsettling comic-horror novel is a whole city of them. London’s high-rises and pubs are a-crawl with yuppie greed-head vampires, super-model vampires, dumb, vicious, coke-snorting vampires, lip-glossed and moussed to a fare-thee-well vampires. Oh, not vampires! Has she no respect for the undead?

So they aren’t the stately lords of the Carpathians. This is rollicking, knockabout gore, a book short, nasty and brutishly funny . . . even when you know you should be shocked, or at least disapproving.

Dora Vale is its narrator-heroine--a “creative consultant,” that multi-purpose ‘80s pseudo-profession, a balcony gardener who likes popping aphids between her fingers. For years, she has moped unrequitedly after Duncan, a self-absorbed, artsy-fartsy photographer so indifferent to Dora that even when he is turning vampire, he doesn’t want to fang her.

The Enemy is the exquisite vampire Rose/Violet, 3 centuries old, who falls for Duncan ( my vampires have better taste). In her first encounter with Dora, Rose/Violet bites off Dora’s little finger as a warning and chews it like a watercress sandwich.

Dora soon dispatches Rose/Violet with Duncan’s help--the men in this book are virtual window-dressing--remembering to lay newspapers down to protect the carpet before pounding a ruler through Rose/Violet’s heart, hammering it home with a tape dispenser. They dismember Rose/Violet, but Dora keeps one of her tiny, chic hands, upping the ante from a little finger.

Years later, Rose/Violet recovers from being partitioned and returns to London, still hot for Duncan. She runs a large media corporation to boot, and is ready to launch a vampire Gotterdammerung called Rotnacht --”Red Night.” Dora is, of course, one of the few to see it coming.

That Billson’s story line is occasionally chaotic is almost incidental to the cheerful, tacky fun. Killing time before her second showdown with Rose/Violet, Dora disguises herself as a vampire, covering her human smell with cheap scent. In the ladies’ room, however, she finds that her masquerade is doomed; “I didn’t know how I was going to get out of this one. My period had started.”

This first novel is by no means a flawless one. The back story is nakedly sentimental--Duncan is the son of the woman Rose/Violet had truly loved and lost, and she transfers that love to Duncan, blah, blah, blah.

It is the somber underpinnings--the “something is out there” of all effective sci-fi/horror--that made British critics, including Salman Rushdie, take “Suckers” seriously. The “something” that earned Rushdie’s praise was its social satire, the caricature of soulless 1980s London with its upwardly scrabbling, freshly and flashily moneyed classes--Thatcherite Britain’s take on America’s Reaganomics rich. These vampires take literally the business maxim about going for the jugular.

Dora herself is coolly ‘80s selfish, no savior of humankind but out only to wrench Rose/Violet away from the feckless Duncan. And she shows an unnerving relish for her work. As Rotnacht begins, Dora decides to have a little fun on her way out of harm’s way. In a passage that reverberates not of ‘80s greed but of ‘90s mass-killer rage, she enumerates: “There were so many people who deserved to be staked . . . there was the drug-dealer with the howling Alsatians . . . there were all those people who wore leaky headphones on the tube. I didn’t care whether they were vampires or not; I hated them all, and they deserved what was coming to them.”

Yeow. A nice book to visit; I wouldn’t want to live there.

*

Let me say first that I would happily read Anne Rice’s grocery lists. I tumble into her ornate prose like Alice down the rabbit hole, going headfirst into language and plot that command all four dimensions and all six senses.

It is easier, though, to leap into her latest, “Lasher,” after having read its prequel, “The Witching Hour.” So much happened in “Witching,” and so much was left pending at the end, that the second chapter of “Lasher” is necessarily a dense game of catch-up.

Reading it is like marrying into a vast, old Southern family--as “Lasher’s” male hero Michael Curry does--and being introduced all at once to third cousins twice removed and the intimate dialect that is any family’s lore.

And what a family these Mayfairs are--witches on the scale that the Bourbons were monarchs. Their dynastic line wandered from Scotland and Tudor England to Haiti and at last to New Orleans, where, in the late 20th Century, their fortune and power and legend are immense.

In every generation, the Mayfair witches, like Miss America finalists, learn which of their own is the “legatee” who wears the Mayfair emerald and commands the power of the clan. This generation’s “legatee” is Rowan Mayfair, gorgeous, brilliant, sensitive, healing. Did I forget rich? She’s rich, too.

The McGuffin, as Hitchcock would say, is Lasher, half-family pet, half-monster--the handsome, brown-eyed ghost who is both courtier and tormentor to Mayfair women. Lasher is at times a Uriah Heepish spirit, beseeching and importuning even as he has his ruthless way with the Mayfairs.

Rowan, the 13th Mayfair legatee, is part of Lasher’s demonic eugenic design. The family has always interbred like the pharaohs of Egypt, and now the chromosomes come home to roost. Lasher the ghost makes himself flesh by seducing Rowan Mayfair, who gives birth to Lasher incarnate. He imprisons and impregnates his mother/lover, then tries to propagate his kind again on other Mayfair women, with gruesome consequences.

It is not the grand cosmology Rice constructed for the Vampire Chronicles; these are mortals unsure of their psychic and witchly powers, and a reader may find them a bit earthbound--even if the earth is New Orleans, limned in gorgeously tactile language.