Customer Reviews

The Vampire: A Casebook

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The vampire of literature and films is perhaps too familiar, but the underpinnings of the legends in the folk traditions of southeastern Europe are quite different from the popular image, and more interesting.
Eleven fascinating essays by scholars in Slavic studies, anthropology, history, and psychiatry here illuminate this dark corner of primitive imagination, show how such a seemingly bizarre belief is tied to certain folk practices of exhumation, bring the studies up to date with cases of modern "vampires", and offer a psychoanalytic interpretation of the phenomenon. (The "score" rating is an unfortunately ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)

If you are interested in getting behind the fiction to the facts of vampires, this is an excellent place to start. The collection of scholars who wrote essays for this volume come from anthropology as well as psychiatry, with historians as well as students of Slavic culture. Consequently, you are bound to find one perspective on vampires that will suit your personal inclinations. More importantly, taken as a whole the book provides a broad spectrum of academic study of the popular phenomenon.

The Vampire--A Casebook, is fairly informative. It makes the observation in the first chapter that the word Vampire is actually of serbian origen, not transalvanian or hungarian as many people think. It is edited mostly by college professors none of whom seem to believe in any kinds of vampires as being real. One guy teaches a class on vampires at the University of Virginia. He edits the chapter of the book which deals with seventeen or so brief--one paragraph--reports of peasents in Romania's accounts of what vampires do. They're capable of drawing illusions of enchanted forests in so doing converting a hapless victem who believes the illusion into a vampire. The chapter on the greek vampire points out differences and variations of customs from other regions' as well as the similarity of: one way of making a vampire is to have a cat (or sometimes any other object) cross over a corpse. The grusome cover of this book will grab your attention.