A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

The subject matter of this book is absolutely in my wheelhouse, so you can imagine how excited I was to read this. And how sad I am to give it such a low score. Firstly, it needs major editing. There are run-on sentences galore, dependent clauses modifying subjects incorrectly, and the occasional odd word choice. The author also names Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as Godstone. Not once, but multiple times. Was this an instance of bad auto correcting? As for the history, most of it is already old hat to anyone interested in vampires and goth subculture. Very little new info is to be found. The discussion of different vampire media is choppy and reads more like a hackneyed encyclopedia of movie summaries with some thoughts in why humans love vampires so much. There are random, sometimes snarky parenthetical asides that offer little to the discussion. I feel as though I just read a paper by a moderately clever fifteen year-old, not a fifty year-old author. The best part, the most relevant to our interests, was the final interview chapter with different, relevant people, either involved in the goth lifestyle or involved in pertinent media. I think the author interviewed Dacre Stoker, but somehow forget to inform the reader when the voice of the interviewee abruptly changed. This needs heavy editing before its published.