Customer Reviews

The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature

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This book is very good. Twitchell mentions every major work of Romantic vampirism and with most of them does a very good job presenting the scholarly trends surrounding each work as well as his own analysis. However, Twitchell seems to be making some interpretations simply because he wants to distinguish himself, rather than to further understanding of the works. For example, he explains that some scholars have viewed Madeline as a vampire in "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. Some other scholars have viewed Roderick as the vampire and others have argued that it is the House itself that is the vampire. Twitchell makes the argument that the narrator is the vampiric force in the work, without taking into account the fact that Madeline had been exhibiting symptoms of being attacked by a vampire long before the narrator's arrival and the deterioration of Roderick had begun long before the arrival of the narrator as well. His argument was weak and it sounded like he just wanted to throw something out there that had never been tried before just for the hell of it.

This is one of the best guides for romantic periode vampire literature. It is very useful to the casual reader of this genre. The information found in this book is very in detail. Some of the books listed in this are worth checking out.

It's a little dry and heavy on the psychology which was a popular literary device for reviewing horror nearly 30 years ago when this was written. I couldn't imagine picking this up for fun. It's for a vampire genre class I'm taking and I'm not sure I agree with his conclusions but that's the whole fun of literature classes, the different interpretations