Wednesday, February 03, 2010

New---Move Over Buffy! This Axe Isn't Just For Rails!

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith, Grand Central Publishing, 352 pages, $21.99.

Following the success of his bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with another mélange of history and horror, Grahame-Smith inserts a grandiose and gratuitous struggle with vampires into Abraham Lincoln's life. Lincoln learns at an early age that his mother was killed by a supernatural predator. This provokes his bloody but curiously undocumented lifelong vendetta against vampires and their slave-owning allies. The author's decision to reduce slavery to a mere contrivance of the vampires is unfortunate bordering on repellent, but at least it does distract the reader from the central question of why the president never saw fit to inform the public of the supernatural menace. Grahame-Smith stitches hand-to-hand vampire combat into Lincoln's documented life with competent prose that never quite manages to convince.

CWL: Deliver my order in a brown paper bag to the back porch door, please.

Harry Smeltzer asks: "Were Jack Armstrong and the Clary’s Grove Boys actually a coven of blood suckers? Was the pathological sluggishness of George McClellan attributable to the fact that he only came out at night? Did Jefferson Davis sleep in a casket (OK, that one’s obvious – just look at the guy!)? I guess I’ll find out soon enough."

Text Source: Amazon.com
Image Source: Bull Runnings

No comments: