Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: the review

I had the best history teacher in high school. Her name was Jean Murphy (actually, her name was Mary Jean, but she only ever went by Jean) and she loved teaching European history and music and choir. And the way she taught history was simple: she taught us the version that concentrated on sex. Abelard and Heloise! Henry II! Henry VIII! Christ, most of the Wars of the Roses and the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War and do not even get me started on the House of Habsburgs!

Yes. She taught European history-as-sexfest to a bunch of freshman girls at a private all-girls Catholic high school.

I have no idea how much of it was true, but man oh man, do I remember a lot of it.

There is something to teaching the fun stuff, because you just might interest people enough to find out the other stuff.

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A couple of days ago I saw this incredibly hot movie trailer:

I remembered seeing the book in the bookstores. (You know, when I still went into them.) It seemed to be the ultimate expression of what Terry Rossio calls “Mental Real Estate” — concepts we all know and are familiar with, turned on their heads just enough to intrigue us. Lincoln! Vampires! Lincoln being fearsome when it comes to vampires!

But I liked the trailer (because I am a nut for over-the-top action movies, always hoping they will have a coherent plot line), so I got the book and read it.

(Yes, I bought this book and immediately read it. I have hundreds of unread books on my Kindle and iPad that have sat there unread for a long time. Hundreds. I’m not saying that pricing your book at free guarantees I’m not going to pay much attention to it; I’m just saying there’s a strong damn correlation along that way of thinking.)

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith is what I call an “all-in” book — the author took his premise (that Abraham Lincoln was a secret vampire hunter, and that a major force behind American slavery was the needs of vampires) and Grahame-Smith went all-in on it. There is no winking to the audience, there is no “I know this sounds kind of stupid, but just go with it” passages. World War Z by Max Brooks is another “all-in” book — you are either along for that ride, or you give up early on. The conceit is that the author of the book in the present comes across Abraham Lincoln’s secret diaries and decides to write the definitive biography of Lincoln in regards to vampires.

That is how the book reads: a deadly serious biography of Lincoln, with descriptions of the time period and excerpts from the diaries, that describe everything from life on Indiana to floating down the Mississippi to butchering the horrible vampires that are preying on the people. No sparkly bits here, people, no really-cute-vampires-with-a-soul. No, these are monsters and Lincoln is going to put them down.

There are a couple of serious missteps: I read three passages relatively close together (I read fast) that were all dream sequences. (And that was before we get to the famous “the President has been assassinated” dream Lincoln had.)

The difficult thing about this book is the obvious slavery/vampirism metaphor. The obvious way of looking at this is that the entire concept of slavery gets cheapened by making it a vehicle for vampires to thrive. And, I guess that’s true.

However.

I was reminded of Jean Murphy while reading this book. Two reasons why:

1) It’s not Seth Grahame-Smith’s job to teach you history. I’m really sorry if you didn’t know this stuff ahead of time. He wanted to write a fun, crazy novel, and he succeeded, and he managed to get lots of info about the real Abraham Lincoln’s life in there. He does a very good job of making all of the details about the time period feel true (hey, how ’bout that Presidential bodyguard, eh?). So, as a readable history novel: good job, Grahame-Smith.

2) If this book gets one person interested in that time period, whereupon they discover that all this shit is true, it just didn’t involve any fucking vampires, it involved real flesh-and-blood humans doing this to one another then, you know, WINNING.

Because that’s actually where the real sense of dread comes in. Yeah, all of the over-the-top let’s-kill-these-fiends stuff is a lot of fun. The bad Photoshop jobs (sorry, they looked terrible on the iPad) are fun. But the descriptions of slave auctions and slave quarters and that half of the country was willing to fight the other half so that they could own people are all true, and you realize: this shit actually happened. And it doesn’t take a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the very name of which makes readers groan) — you can sucker readers in with Vampires! and bitch-slap them across the face with Not Really! LOL!

If they don’t get to the point where they realize, OMG, this is all real (except for the vampire parts), well… that’s not going to be fixed by one pop novel.

I wonder how many student term papers have talked about the vampire influence on the Confederacy.

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You want to know the tidbit that’s really stuck with me from this book?

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas dated the same chick.

Okay, it was called “courting” and wasn’t the same thing at all, but…

I’m still that high school freshman, apparently.