Customer Reviews

The Last Days of Christ the Vampire

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I still read it every now and then, just for a good laugh.

I think it has an excellent thought provoking hypothesis and may well be closer to the truth than other current ideas about christ.

People complain about the writing, which is average at best, but it was never intended to be high literature.
Read it and enjoy . . .

The Last Days of Christ the Vampire is a book that is more than a little reminiscent of Robert A. Wilson's Illuminatus series. Eccarius gives a less than charitable view of Christianity and its founder, and a vision of a world run by a council of vampires that has members ranging from Aliester Crowley to Genghis Kahn. The book is a little disjointed in spots, and leaves the reader with a lot more questions than it answers, but for some that could be a recomendation in and of itself. If you enjoy paranoid conspiracy novels, I can certainly recommend this book without hesitation. If, however, you are an Anne Rice fan looking for yet another incarnation of Lestat. you would be better off looking elsewhere

As others below note, this is a horribly written novel with a great premise: Christianity was founded by a vampire. Makes perfect sense: isn't communion just Jesus' followers drinking his blood? With tongue in cheek, Eccarius exploits the concept pretty well, then wanders off into a confusing "noble anarchists vs. the Pope and his vampire legions" plot, draining any momentum he's built as surely as a parish priest drains an altarboy of B negative. Eccarius should sell the concept to a competent writer-- what would Dan Brown do with this??

A inconsistent novel, in that the author can't seem to decide whether to portray Jesus as a vampire, or as some kind of astral parasite that utilises human brains as a host. I thought it started very well, set in the town of Providence. Jesus Christ as one of H.P. Lovecraft's "old ones" is an interesting concept. The dream scenes were good, with the people being haunted by images of the apparently true nature of Christianity. The idea that the astral demons such as Christ harvest energy when people are slaughtered in battle is also interesting, as is the suggestion that the capitalist system needs Christianity. I agree with the point another reviewer made about how the book loses momentum as it progresses.

The Most horrifying thing about the book is the way it is written, that alone cannot undo the good ideas presented.

This is a fascinating idea, written in the style of the religious pamphlets people hand out on subways. The grand conspiracy of vampires is entertaining, but the book suffers from poor proofreading, poor characterization, a disjointed plot and absolutely awful writing. Had the author teamed up with another, more talented, writer, and refrained from inserting all the left-wing and anarchist philosophy, this might deserve comparison to the Illuminatus! Trilogy.

The book has a very creative premise, which offers all kinds of possibilities, but Eccarius' writing style (if it can be called that) seriously undermines any chance this book had at being good. One line that struck me as especially bad came when a group of male anarchists were standing around, "calculating, subconsciously, the probability of getting into their (the female anarchists') respective pants. In a nice manner, of course, fully respective of their humanity." Eccarius' underwhelming talent pretty much wipes out any possibility this book had of being taken seriously. This is a shame, because, as I said, he starts with a great premise.