{"id":726,"date":"2010-05-19T22:31:41","date_gmt":"2010-05-20T06:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=726"},"modified":"2010-05-19T22:31:41","modified_gmt":"2010-05-20T06:31:41","slug":"review-abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=726","title":{"rendered":"Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a whole<\/a> lotta<\/a> vampires around here lately.\u00a0 (Not to mention the alternate history<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter<\/em> is a pastiche of Lincoln biographies (practically a genre of history unto themselves) and horror films, in the vein of the same author’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies<\/em>. It works better than it has a right to, really, and as long as one doesn’t think about it too hard, it’s a good time.<\/p>\n

Grahame-Smith writes a gripping yarn well, and is adept at aping the genre conventions of both sides of his literary coin. Several chapter transitions seem taken directly from recent Lincoln<\/a> bios<\/a>, and the action is all fun and cinematic.\u00a0 If you know who these historical figures are, it’s fun to see how Grahame-Smith recasts them.\u00a0 If you’ve never heard of them, you still get a good story of war against vampires.<\/p>\n

In this world, vampires are allied with the South for the access to food that slavery brings them.\u00a0 Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War is not so much to preserve the Union as to stamp out the vampires. And therein lies the part of the book that’s problematical.<\/p>\n

Certainly the nation’s motivations in the Civil War were complex and not always on the high road; more to the point, Lincoln’s own motivations were never cut and dried.\u00a0 However, making actual inhuman monsters into the cause of Civil War cheapens the conflict a little more than I’d like for such a light book.\u00a0 Furthermore, with the introduction of a national conspiracy of “good” vampires (called “the Union”), humans in general are made bit players in the struggle.<\/p>\n

Now, there is something conceptually nice about tying slavery to vampirism.\u00a0 It’s difficult to take an apologist for actual, actual, actual vampires seriously and one should consider slavery apologists in the same vein.\u00a0 And yet, I still think it simplifies the struggle more than it should.<\/p>\n

Now, I have a bad tendency to over analyze, well, everything.\u00a0 I honestly don’t think that Vampire Hunter<\/em> stands up to such scrutiny, but I don’t think it’s intended to.\u00a0 Read as a rip-roaring vampire yarn with occasional winks and nods to our history, it’s a very good time, so I encourage you to read it that way.<\/p>\n

Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a whole lotta vampires around here lately.\u00a0 (Not to mention the alternate history.) Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a pastiche of Lincoln biographies (practically a genre of history unto themselves) and horror films, in the vein of the same author’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It works better than it has a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":732,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions\/732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}