Well, methinks too much good and bad is often uttered about Twilight.
For one thing, while Edward and his family are very nice people overall, the vampires themselves are ferociously dangerous. Wooden stakes, silver bullets, even sunlight or crosses have zero effect. If a Twilight vampire bites you, that vampire is driven into a blood frenzy while the venom injected during the bite paralyzes with all-consuming agony. The point is made over and over again how during the process of becoming undead, the newborn keeps screaming and begging for death. And that doesn't even include the sadistic pleasure most vampires (like James or Victoria or Jane) get in wielding their power to torture and kill.
Unlike Dark Shadows, the vampires created by Stephanie Myers are simply predators. That delicate balance between desire and danger is still there--but geared towards a different kind of audience, a (generally) less sophisticated and more naive one. Really, the whole tension of the first book almost evaporates without the fact that Edward finds the smell of Bella mouthwateringly tempting, so much so that (as we learn in the unfinished version of that book from Edward's POV) after meeting her Edward had to expend enormous effort to (unsuccessfully) stop thinking about ways to kill all witnesses so he could devour her right at that moment.
Methinks this deserves more credit than many of its detractors allow--just as it deserves plenty more criticism than its avid fans might willingly consider.
Barnabas and Edward are, IMHO (and with forgiveness begged for the pun) in the same "vein" of character archetypes. Both see themselves as monsters, have rigid senses of honor, are drama queens of the first order, etc. Barnabas is a more classic vampire, with far more of the "props" we've come to expect from the gothic-style vampire. Yet he and the other undead of Dark Shadows actually bear little resemblance to the vampires of legend. Folklore says nothing about crosses, about bats or about sunlight, much less silver bullets. Nothing at all. Yet their whole milieu literally wraps itself in gothic sensibilities--the candles, the fog, the winds whispering over Widow's Hill, the secret passages in the two old mansions above the tiny New England town, the howling of the dogs, etc.
Hammer eat your heart out.
Me, I have my criticisms of all, but I don't begrudge anyone their faves. I even forgive people for liking Moonlight (which says a lot about how much I dislike that show, btw--a guilt-ridden vampire WITH NOTHING TO BE GUILTY ABOUT! Edward at least had killed people and wanted to kill more. Barnabas destroyed whole lives, often through his own stubbornness and foolishness as well as his bloodlust. But that guy on Moonlight felt wracked with guilt because he didn't tell a girl he was a vampire ON THE FIRST DATE! Jeez!).
