Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by Seth Grahame-Smith

(New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010)

Hardcover, 337 Pages, Historical Fiction

ISBN: 9780446563086, US$21.99

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? —Edgar Allan Poe

FACTS

1. For over 250 years, between 1607 and 1865, vampires thrived in the shadows of America. Few humans believed in them.
2. Abraham Lincoln was one of the gifted vampire hunters of his day, and kept a secret journal about his lifelong war against them.
3. Rumors of the journal’s existence have long been a favorite topic among historians and Lincoln biographers. Most dismiss it as myth.

From the Cover: Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.” “My baby boy…” she whispers. Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work if a vampire. When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “Henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House. While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving the Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years. Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time—all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

My Review: So, when I learned back in October that Quirk books would (1) be publishing a prequel to their wildly successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and that (2) it would not be penned by PPZ scribe Seth Grahame-Smith, I was very disappointed. However, I then learned in November that it was because Grahame-Smith was writing his own book: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I think that Grahame-Smith made the right decision. For, as fun as the PPZ prequel was (and I think Grahame-Smith would have made it better than Hockensmith managed) had Grahame-Smith decided to reenter Austen’s zombified universe, the world would have been denied the raucous history-rewriting adventure that is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

I think that what I enjoyed most about this book was Grahame-Smith’s devotion to the central conceit: chiefly, that vampires have been a part of America’s history, to the point that all of the major events of America’s birth are directly attributable to vampire influence. Grahame-Smith even goes so far as to rewrite his own history to fit the events of the novel, writing himself into the Abraham Lincoln-vampire timeline. My only “complaint” (for lack of a better word) about this total commitment to “historical accuracy” is that I wish Grahame-Smith had taken it the final step and made the whole book look like a work of nonfiction complete with an index and faux-Works Cited/Bibliography page. I think that would have gone a long way further down the road to making this seem even more real than it already does.

That aside, however, the book is an amazing read: unputdownable even. I blasted through it in about three days and thoroughly enjoyed ever minute of it, which at this point (now that my Winter Quarter is over) is the best thing I could ask of a book. What’s more, though, is this is not a brainless book. In fact, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a surprisingly smart book. There is a lot of interesting things going on in the book with race and class (as represented by the vampires).

I used the word “raucous” earlier to describe ALVH and I really cannot come up with a better description than that. This is a raucous adventure book that has a lot of fun with its central idea and even manages to serve up some surprises. The ending caught me completely off guard, and there are a number of fun cameos within its pages. When it comes to the strange and weird, Seth Grahame-Smith does it better than anyone I have come across in a very long time … and he certainly enjoys doing it, which translates into a joy for the Reader to pick up.

Make no bones about it, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a page-turner that will keep you up and reading into the early hours of the morning … begging for more. I eagerly await Grahame-Smith’s next project…