The Vampire: A New History Paperback – September 15, 2020

This is an excellent history of the vampire's transition from Balkan folkore to Anglophone popular culture. Groom's style is both rigorous and readable, drawing on top-tier sources in history, literature, and social sciences. He does an excellent job profiling Western Europe's "discovery" of the vampire, including the manic 18th-century vampire hunts that rivaled the UFO craze of the 1950s. Subsequent chapters critique the emergence of vampire fiction, which Groom appreciates in both Victorian intellectual context and on its own merits.As much as I like the work of Paul Barber or the compilations of Alan Dundes or Jan Perkowski, I would recommend this book as the first step for most erudite readers seeking an understanding of vampire folklore and it's transition to the the literary tradition.

I never got the thread about how he was sorting these chapters. Maybe I will if I read it again.That said, if you are a vampire fanatic, as I am, this is well researched.I'm not going to go into the details of what he writes.I'm going to let the book itself show you.The text runs to page 206 - oddly starting with how pumpkins and watermelons can turn into vampires and ending with potatoes and their association with vampires.That, along with some other things, made me wonder if he isn't poking fun at his readers all along.But that matters not.You want details? He provides details:Endnotes: Pages 207-247Bibliography: Pages 248-272Index: Pages 273-287Plus 16 Pages of nifty illustrationsYou have enough reference materials to sink your teeth into later if you desire, but this guy has sucked up all the vampire literature, lore, medical books, movies, plays and distilled it into a volume that will keep you entranced.

When I touched the first time this book, The Vampire A New History by Nick Groom I felt a sensation of elegance, warm, peace and love: and reading this book I can tell you that it is not surprising. This one is a monumental, beautiful, accurate study about vampires, their birth and myth analyzed starting from the past centuries, focusing on the Enlightenment for then arriving at the modern books and productions.This amazing, enchanting, researched book about vampires was written for remembering the first important story, The Vampyre by John Polidori at that time in the court of Lord Byron, but to me it gives back all the possible powerful and dignity at this demoniac creature, in our society seen and revisited in many different ways during these past decades.Vampires, with the time, became commercial creatures, and a lot of people, fields, took advantage of the interest created by these nocturnal creatures.Groom's book spaces through various disciplines, forensic studies, realistically digging into graves, searching for corpses, analyzing the behavior of some blood-sucker bats, but also trying to define, thanks to weird episodes occurred in particular in East of Europe, why people started to being obsessively interested at these kind of monsters: "dead" people not anymore alive in the common sense of the word but in grade of living thanks to blood-sucking; this blood sucking meant contamination and horror and at the same time new life for the vampire. In most cases, I thought reading the book, that the cases of infections and new illnesses sometimes without doubts were caused by the superficial behavior taken when bodies were re-exhumed without any kind of precaution because of this spasmodic love for the horror: this behavior brought more illnesses undoubtedly.There were some weird episodes, as we said. A man died, tells the author, and was buried, but for a reason or another he reappeared to the neighbors all happy and cheerful; scared, they told everything to the priest who practiced an exorcism and later cut the head of this man for killing him. In general all people accused potentially of being vampires once buried, where again re-exhumed and after that they followed the procedure for trying to delete the force of the devil from the body; the last act was the cremation. The person needed to be completely "deleted" from the face of the Earth. Every signal, once opened a grave of a suspected vampire, looking at his corpse, analyzed with morbidity, see at the voice, mouth and veins could become real hysteria. In the past it was still unknown what happened when a man was buried. We know now everything about the process of deterioration of a corpse: it's more than known that hair and nails continue to grow for more than 3-4 months after the departure of the person; at that time no one knew it, and it meant for that person/corpse a probable consideration of being classified as a potential vampire.Blood of certain people killed for heavy reasons donated for being drunk at sick people. If they suffered before, imagine later.It was trendy to extract tooth at corpses also in the past centuries; you would think for being re-sold.Yes, but for being transplanted. They were expensive tooth and they brought at a secure death or big infections the person who choose the tooth of a dead person as a "new" one.While there was this kind of hysteria, what religion said about vampires? What was the official position?While the Protestants talked of pure fantasy closing any door to vampires without many compliments, the Catholic church fed and nurtured this fantasy.Mr.Groom analyzes the vampire reading him under a more religious aspect: the blood that he is sucking is an anti-Eucharistic ritual.The vampire must sucks blood for a living but this action doesn't pass through compassion, humiliation, pain, sufferance; it doesn't save men as it happens to Jesus Christ: it is not a passage for a salvation if not an egoistic one. The Vampire is a creature, who, without any feeling, without any heart, without anymore technically blood, if not the one sucked from the body of other people, must kill, must destroys, must be cause of sufferance and devastation. It's not incorrect to say that a vampire is a creature that feeds himself with his own cruelty and dissolution, because heartless and not anymore a living creature, but at the same time not a dead man.Not only: as the author will remarks, Polidori with The Vampyre, published at first as if written by Lord Byron and creating for this reason a big din because lived by Polidori of course as an outrageous gesture, a vampiric one maybe, who knows? influenced profoundly Mary Shelley and his Frankenstein, born thanks to the good intuition of Polidori for these creatures. The profound influence of Polidori's short tale, was massively more important than what we can think and imagine.The final part of the book is about Bram Stoker and Dracula. Very well known book, personally I like it a lot because it is an epistolary book: the author remarks that Stoker donated new morbid treats at the Vampire, the modern one as we intend it, characterizing him not just like a cruel creature but also as a lascivious one, donating him that sex appeal that he wouldn't never have lost anymore; a characterization, important to remark this one, heavily influenced by The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.The two authors were in contacts, and Bram Stoker married a lady close to Oscar Wilde. It is not so unthinkable that Stoker has taken some bits from Dorian Gray, and many many other products and publications: so this book after all is not at all an original tale and the analysis of Groom donates new light in this sense; where John Polidori acted with originality, using as example after all someone close to him, Lord Byron, Stoker, for presenting sensationalism accumulated tales, material and other writings for being used later and from the most diversified parts. Three of Stoker's brothers were doctors and this one played an important role in the construction of the book. Also the location chosen by the author according to Groom not the happiest one.The Vampire started to have distant connotation from the original one. He became a perverted, someone in grade to create offenses at children, (vampires girls kill and eat children for example) women, men; a corrupted soul not just because he needs blood for surviving. Deviance starts to be sexual one as well.It is not distant to add that with Stoker and its creature, Dracula, was born a new genre of vampire, a "literary mutation" in grade of changing the course of the vampires's story; Dracula is still influencing with its characterizations our society. Groom will also analyses the connection felt by certain people about vampires, serial killers and mass shootings murderers.A society, this one, more than fixated with vampires of every sorta.It is a vampiric society this one, under many aspects and more than the ones previously seen; to my point of view only when these creatures will rest some bit in peace and will be forgotten, and a new model of society and also creatures, maybe more angelical and tranquil will be taken in consideration, it will want to say that the world is returned in the good direction. After all, the creatures of the fantasy more famous and wanted, are just the mirror or our society.The book ends taking in considerations of the newest and beloved productions seen recently on the big screen or TV: from Vampires Diaries to Twilight.Highly recommended, this book is a beautiful and serious study and a new wind; maybe these words will donate after a lot of confusion a different idea of vampires to the world; more old-fashioned and real although always scaring.A great gift for Halloween! this one.I thank Yale University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Interesting good price

A fascinating book that is incredibly well researched and a delight to read.

Un libro ben scritto ricco di teorie innovative come una nuova chiave di lettura vampirica di Frankenstein, molto interessante!

Fantastic book my friend loved it

Groom's book-length non-fictional account of the vampire is good guide to the pre-Romantic period where in Europe there were still testimonies and witness accounts of vampires. It really helps the reader to understand why the 18th century is called the Age of Reason.The author traces the origin of the word "vampire" through many European languages to examine what those linguistic signs signified in the period before the Middle Ages. Such examination helps to explain why people in the early ages had such cultural practices like staking the dead body.Interestingly, the so-called vampire enjoys a multitude of identities through out the 18th to the 19th centuries: vampirism is a social metaphor for the land-holding class and it is also a political metaphor against the rich. Particularly relevant is the remark from Karl Marx and Engels in the early Victorian period. Theologically, vampirism, to the author, is a Protestant attack on Catholicism.The author gives a good assessment on vampiric writing of the 19th century by focusing on the key texts in fiction as well as early 19th C. poems which include Robert Southey's poem about a vampire. It is in these two chapters that the author is most successful for his critical readings of Frankenstein and Dracula. The being in Shelley's debut novel is implied to be vampiric as he kills himself in cremation--quite an remarkable interpretation. For the role of Dracula, the author tries to see the Count not as an agent of "reverse colonialism" but as circulatory system, coupled with female sexual desires.As a "history", the book is full of historical information with his focus on the key texts of vampiric writing; but as a "new history", many of his arguments are presented without further elaboration.

A very readable book and 'new' in the sense that I don't think anyone has treated the vampire like this before....as a symptom/cypher of what is wrong in society...be it economics, politics, culture or whatever. It's rather overwritten, I thought, even though the body of the text proper (200 pages) is quite short. My favourite section was on the cholera epidemic in Sligo. I wish there had been more in the way of narratives like this. The book is couched in social science terminology and is, in fact, an academic title. I had to refer to the dictionary more than once...good for me, I suppose. I thought there was a tendency to stretch arguements to fit...especially at the end of chapters where the line of thought was almost forced into a sort of QED conclusion to segue into the next chapter. Fair enough...but I thought it unnecessary. There seemed to be no discussion of one of the prime characteristics of the vampire...that is as one who grants eternal life. Nevertheless anyone interested in the subject would be doing themselves a disservice not to read this book.